Nigerian Broadband Plan approved
GOVERNMENT
By BiztechAfrica – June 4, 2013, 7:01 a.m.
President Goodluck Jonathan has approved the National Broadband Plan aimed at addressing national broadband issues.
The Minister of Communication Technology, Omobola Johnson, presented the Nigerian National Broadband Plan for 2013 to 2018 to the President last week.
The Plan, which was developed by the Presidential Committee on Broadband over the past few months, is described as the first of its kind whereby the Ministry is taking the initiative to address the national broadband challenges in the country.
The Committee was inaugurated by the President late last year to come up with a viable five-year plan to address the challenges.
The policy document states: “Although there are some initiatives aimed at deploying broadband in Nigeria, many challenges remain, especially with the deployment of a national fibre optic based network to distribute approximately 10 terabytes of capacity already delivered to landing points in Nigeria. Therefore, there is an urgent need to accelerate the pace of ongoing efforts, and also to introduce new initiatives to address this challenge. This is necessary for the actualization of the developmental goals of Vision 20:2020.”
The Government will therefore pursue, by the end of 2017, a fivefold increase in broadband penetration over the 2012 penetration rate.
Among other things, the committee has defined broadband within the Nigerian context as an internet experience where the user can access the most demanding content in real time at a minimum speed of 1.5Mbit/s.
The Plan also outlines cyber security threats and states: “The government realizes that every modern nation state depends on the reliable functioning of its critical infrastructure to guarantee national and economic security. The term critical Infrastructure in this plan, refers to ICT networks and systems that are crucial to the Federal Republic of Nigeria to the extent that the damage, destruction or ineffectiveness of such networks and systems, whether physical or virtual, would have adverse impact on our national security, economic wellbeing, public safety, food security or any combination thereof.”
The full Broadband Plan is available here.
