Mobile broadband plan soars high, cost 17% of national minimum wage
Despite Nigeria access to the SAT-3 submarine cable, Internet access has continued to soar high and remained relatively expensive, that the citizens cannot access the internet with ease and speed.
Prof. Adesola Aderoumu ,the President NCS, who agreed with this assertion, told the Daily Times that the high cost of internet access remains one of the fundamental reasons why internet access is not present in most homes in the country; while some homes in cities like Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Abuja, among others, have Internet services, a high number of Internet users still seek refuge in cybercafés for internet access while others rely on their offices for access.
He stated that broadband remains unaffordable for the vast majority of Nigerians, stressing that typically a fixed broadband plan costs about N9, 000.00 which translates to 50% of national minimum wage of N18, 000 per month, while a mobile broadband plan cost N3, 000 or 17% of the national minimum wage.
According to him, the International Telecommunications Union (2013) puts cost of fixed broadband and mobile broadband at 39% and 13% of average monthly income respectively.
He lamented that broadband remains unaffordable despite having broadband service providers like Main One, Glo1, SAT3 and WACS, with capacities of international submarine cable landings at our shores. The high cost, he said can be attributed to Infrastructure deficiency, high cost of Right of Way (ROW), Security of Infrastructure, Spectrum Allocation among others.
The President of NCS, highlighted that demand is predicted to increase if the country can achieve a balance between providing high-cost infrastructure and ensuring its usage through the development of appropriate instruments (incentives, reduced taxes, free Internet offices in rural areas, reduce regulatory difficulties involved in obtaining right of way permits for access to streets, roads, and other public land, etc.) to increase demand for broadband services.
There is a need for spectrum aggregation and spectrum re-farming across the whole band by NCC to stimulate broadband supply and demand toward activities such as e-government, e-health, e-education, e-agriculture and e-commerce, open access model as a framework to enable fibre-optic cable carriers to share the infrastructure used in the deployment of their cables.
Other strategies are Public-Private Partnerships at both the Federal and State level to develop fibre rings across all major towns in the country; Telecommunication licensees should be encouraged to lay optical fibre to all their base stations, exchanges, and interconnect points employing the Open Access and Shared Infrastructure Framework;
intensification of the establishment of community communication centres as platform for extending ICT to the rural communities with such centres providing voice; Internet connectivity, and ICT training courses, and Public-Private Partnerships at State level to develop local fibre rings across all local government headquarters and major towns in the country,” he added.
