The Federal Government of Nigeria has announced that the Five Generation (5G) network will be deployed across the country by January 2022.
This was disclosed on Thursday by the Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, during a Town Hall Meeting in Maiduguri organized by the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture to address vandalism of power and telecommunications infrastructure.
According to Pantami, who was represented by Mr. Ubale Maska, Commissioner for Technical Services, Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC), “while the technology would boost surveillance against criminal elements vandalizing public infrastructure across the country, other measures should be put in place to arrest them and bring them to book.”
Pantami added that, with the deployment of modern technology, the management of the over 50,000 telecommunication sites across the country has proven difficult to manually man.
There were about 16,000 reported outages by mobile network operators such as MTN, Globacom, Airtel, and 9Mobile between January 2021 and July 2021, the Minister disclosed.
He added that the outages were caused by fiber cuts, access denial, and theft leading to service disruption in the affected areas adding that the protection of the critical infrastructural facility was key to the nation’s security, economic vitality, public health, and safety.
