The Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), Professor Umaru Dambata has assured Nigerians that the Commission was poised to deploy digital broadband communication technology to all the 774 local government areas in the country, to enhance quality of telecommunication services.
Dambata made the disclosure on Tuesday at the National Assembly, when he led the management of the NCC to defend the Commission’s 2020 budget proposal before the joint Committees on Communications of the Senate and House of Representatives.
During his presentation, Prof. Dambata also disclosed that the Commission had developed a strategic fibre optic deployment map that will cover all the geopolitical zones in the country for the smooth operations of the telecom operators to enhance quality of service across board.
“We are planning to deploy fibre optic cables in all the geopolitical zones in the country, including Lagos. Lagos has been designated as a zone on its own because of the commercial and strategic importance of Lagos. So Lagos has been made the 7th zone according to the categorization of infrastructure development for the country.
“We are making a request through the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy for a consideration for this deployment because it is going to entail a counterpart funding. The project is a Public Private Partnership Project (PPP). Therefore, the commission is poised to seek counterpart funding.
“The important thing about this project is that there will be a point of access in every local government area in the country, So, all the 774 local governments will have a point of broadband access of 10 Gigabyte per second capacity”, the NCC boss told the committee.
Dambata, while speaking on the quality of services of the telecommunication operators in Nigeria, assured the committee that the NCC was alive to its duties in monitoring the service output of the operators to ensure that Nigerians were not shortchanged by the operators.
He told the committee that the NCC has an established “key performance indicators” that was the threshold of the service delivery of the service providers and that the commission ensures that the performance indicators were strictly adhered to by the operators.
“On the Quality of service, we monitor this mostly; we have information about the quality of service in virtually all parts of the Country, all the states and in all the local governments. And we have key performance indicators; we are able to measure the quality of service that is provided by the telecom operators. Where we find the quality of service poor and below the standard stipulated, we normally insist that measures must be taken to improve the quality of service and we do this every month,” Dambata added.
He said the Commission would need the support of the National Assembly to ensure the rate of N145 per linear metre of fibre cable is respected and adhered to by all states and local government areas in the country.
This, the NCC boss said, will greatly assist the Commission in its quest to deploy more infrastructures.
