Current Industry Structure Impedes Nigeria’s Broadband Dev. Goals – Etisalat CEO

The current structure of the telecommunications industry in Nigeria has been identified as an impediment to the attainment of the country’s broadband penetration targets.

The Chief Executive Officer of Etisalat Nigeria, Matthew Willsher expressed this opinion in his keynote address at the 2015 Commonwealth Broadband Forum 2015 held in Abuja, Nigeria from June 16 to 17, 2015.

According to Willsher, the inability of a majority of operators in the industry to achieve the scale necessary to support broadband deployment is perhaps, the most critical challenge affecting broadband growth in Nigeria. 

In his words, “Broadband deployment involves considerable amounts of fixed cost and struggling operators who are unable to attract the volume of reasonably priced, long-term funding required to deploy and operate broadband infrastructure profitably, are leaving a major broadband investment deficit. The resultant shortfall is underlined by Nigeria’s ICT investment as a percentage of GDP ratio of 2.6% while the average for peer countries is 5.5%.”  

While commending the Ministry of Communications Technology and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), for their contributions to the progress made in the sector, he demanded for more work to be done to drive broadband development in Nigeria.

“Notwithstanding the appreciable progress in broadband deployment in Nigeria, considerable effort is still required to move Nigeria towards its broadband targets. When benchmarked against peer countries, it is clear that there is a considerable gap between where we are and where we

should be, given the size of our industry and economy,” he said.

He added that Nigeria’s mobile broadband penetration stands at 10.1% while the average for peer countries in Africa is 30%. Peer countries have an average Smartphone penetration of 26% while Nigeria’s Smartphone penetration averages 12%.