Broadband Council Okays 4 Coastal States for Cable Landing

The National Broadband Council, last week, approved the building of fibre optic cable landing points in four coastal states to ensure widespread penetration of high capacity internet bandwidths in the country. The project according to the Council is expected to be financed by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF).

The four states approved in the plan includes Rivers, Bayelsa, Cross River and Ondo States as part of government’s effort to encourage telecommunication operators to establish cable landing points across the country. This is in addition to Lagos State, which houses international submarine optic cables from Main One Cable Company, MTN’s West Africa Cable System (WACS), SAT 3 from the NITEL and Globacom’s Glo 1 cable.

Chairman of the council and minister of communications technology, Dr Omobola Johnson, explained that the cable landing points will promote the rapid establishment of recovery and restoration agreements among the cable companies and delivery of additional landing points for national security and resilience purposes.

For her, additional landing points in the country would make it faster and cheaper to lay terrestrial cable from these points to other parts of the country and reduce vulnerability and risks associated with a single point of failure in the system. Against this backdrop, the Council urged the nation’s regulatory body, the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC and the USPF to look into the possibility of providing financial incentives to accelerate this.

Meanwhile, the executive vice chairman of the NCC, Dr Eugene Juwah, has assured that the current arbitrary, predatory and discriminatory pricing inherent in the transmission line market segment would be reversed with a new regulation and enforcement on cost-based transmission cable pricing.