Sustainable broadband development through strategic leverage of broadband technologies in Nigeria

Abstract

Over the past seven years, Nigeria the most populous African country has made tremendous growth in its telecom sector since the liberalization of the sector in year 2000; this fact was first mentioned by the International Telecommunications Union in its African Telecoms Indicators Report presented at the ITU Telecoms Africa Expo in Cairo, Egypt in May 2004. In spite of the fast increase in the teledensity, from year 2000-2007 the internet penetration still suffer a very slow growth of 0.1% in 2000 and 14% in 2007. Moreover, the Nigeria case is similar to populous countries like Russia, Brazil India and so on, who in spite of their high technological capability and economy still posses low internet penetration. In this context, this report focuses on a systematic identification and integration of appropriate broadband technologies for the three major demography of Nigeria namely rural, semi-urban and Urban; using a Multi-Criteria Decision Making technique called Analytical Hierarchy Process. It analysis key challenges of deployment in terms cost and technical characteristic of the most promising broadband technologies.