SAT 3 Cable Energises Nigeria's Telecom Revolution
By Valentine Anozia
 22nd SEP 2006

For over 130 million people that make up Nigeria, costly bandwidth continues to make the Internet a rather inaccessible window. 

Virtually all of Nigeria’s Internet traffic, depends on satellite connections, which are several times more costly than the fibre-optic links between the US and Europe up to Asia. Satellite providers, primarily Intelsat, New Skies and Panamsat, provide all international bandwidth for Nigeria.

What this indirectly dictates is that Nigeria does not have an exchange of its own and therefore is routed via the exchange of the host countries where the satellite hubs are located. This comes with several disadvantages that make it difficult to evaluate Nigeria's internet presence and it also leaves Nigeria at the mercy of the controls of this other countries, like our .ng domain that is being hosted by foreign countries for so many years. At the moment, if a user in Ikorodu wants to send an email to  another user in Ikoyi, the traffic first goes to USA or Europe via the hubs located there before coming back, with a local internet exchange, the traffic will be routed via the local exchange.

 Currently, six submarine cables provide international fiber connectivity to Africa. All remaining international bandwidth is provided by satellite.
 
The  SAT-3 which has ultimate capacity of 120 Gps is linked to Nigeria through Nitel and runs from South Africa to Portugal with landing points in Angola, Gabon, Cameroon, Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Canary Islands, and Spain.

SAT-3 cable will provide a low-cost port for IP connectivity to the rest of the world and will facilitate the building of a local Internet exchange in Nigeria which is vital to increase efficiency and reduce cost of internet traffic originating and terminating within Nigeria and other neighboring regions. This is key to energizing Nigeria’s telecom revolution.

The efficient use of SAT 3 will spur the image of Nigeria internationally and bring Nigeria in the league of the rest of the world enabling Nigeria to participate in this era of third generation (3G) technology where there is apparent convergence of data, voice and video services. These services have a high demand on bandwidth and this is where the high capacity that SAT 3 provides comes to play.
Nigeria is shackled by huge cost of bandwidth, and with a thriving telecom market, we have only been able to explore not more than 10% per cent of the existing potentials in Information and Communications Technology (ICT). There is a substantial grey-market use of Voice over Internet (VoIP) services in Africa wherever international bandwidth allows. These services are cheap compared to those from the plain old telephone system but service quality could be higher and price lower should interconnectivity options exist on terrestrial cables. 
Economically, SAT 3 will save Nigeria a lot of foreign exchange because then we will have less to do with the satellite. From findings, Africa alone spends as much as $400m on satellite bandwidth annually and Nigeria pays a big chunk of this. Dedicated bandwidth price in Nigeria hovers around $4800/Kbps (about N6.1m) for a month.

In terms of educational, social and corporate use, SAT3 will play an import role in energizing the telecommunication industry.  An Internet culture has failed to evolve as it should in most schools and university as a result of the constraints of cost of access and low availability of bandwidth. These issues affect the cybercafés and other corporate organization that need to participate in e –commerce (e.g. On-line banking) to be competitive in this modern day. Connectivity between remote locations can also be improved upon. With the eventual proper utilization of SAT 3, all of this will be a thing of the past.

Cyber crime and security and are a major issue in Nigeria and needs to be addressed with urgency. An Internet exchange will serve as a national security checkpoint to control and monitor cyber crimes and provide security for Nigeria. The success of setting up an Internet exchange point in Nigeria is dependent on the utilization of the high bandwidth capacity of SAT3. It will help a great deal to curb the 419 menace because then, people can be more easily traced by their IP address and we can achieve better customized controls.

The efficient bandwidth that SAT 3 can provide the country will make it possible host most corporate Nigerian websites locally saving a lot on bandwidth usage and associated foreign exchange cost. Another advantage of this is that access speed to these websites.

Finally, the government and the regulatory bodies should ensure that access to SAT3 is guaranteed to all interested Nigerian firms easily. It is essential that all interested operators have a fair chance of competing in the market to ensure maximization of opportunities by operators and consumers.

Any decision to preserve SAT-3 within the premise of a single operator would risk the survival and success Public Telecom Operators (PTOs). If the management of Nigeria's access to SAT-3 ended in the hands of a single telecommunications company, other operators would have no option but to follow the dictates of that company noting that this could spell doom for their survival. From a security point of view, it is also not a wise decision to sell the only source that the country could use for international marine communications. SAT 3 remains Nigeria’s main communication asset.

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