Nigeria’s National Broadband Council has approved the building of fibre optic cable landing points in Rivers, Bayelsa, Cross River and Ondo states. The council said the new landing sites would facilitate widespread penetration of high capacity internet bandwidths in Nigeria.
Stating the project will be financed by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), the council added it is part of government’s effort to encourage telecommunication operators to establish cable landing points across the country.
Lagos state currently 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.
According to the 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.
She noted that 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.