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Innovation in ICT
Keeping up with the times
Nigeria’s telecoms companies are innovating to meet the challenges brought about by a fast-growing industry. New ways of managing infrastructure and new ways of generating revenue by adding services look set to keep the telecoms sector on track for continued future growth.
Sharing Infrastructure
Fast growth and increasing demand in the country’s telecom industry have sometimes left infrastructure over-stretched. To combat this, the government has awarded licences for companies to provide shared infrastructure for operators in the Internet, mobile and fixed-wireless sectors. Co-location, whereby independent operators provide infrastructure like towers, masts and base stations to multiple operators, has taken off in Nigeria in 2009, as operators find they can reduce capital and operating expenditure by outsourcing infrastructure management to dedicated infrastructure companies. The service also acts as a solution to the operators’ problems of declining service quality due to network congestion and helps the country to slow down the proliferation of telecoms masts. The government is encouraging companies to continue the move towards shared infrastructure so as to increase the industry’s capacity to meet demand going forward.
The two largest co-location companies are Helios Towers Nigeria and IHS, although 17 other companies have been licensed by the NCC to provide co-location services. Helios Towers was given the AfricaCom award for Best Cost Efficiency in Africa in 2009; it has more than 1’000 sites across Nigeria and in October 2009, it received investment of US$250 million from the World Bank to help the company carry out its plan of having over 2’000 sites nationwide by the third quarter of 2010. IHS too is engaged in aggressive roll-out, as it implements plans to construct 500 new sites by early 2010.
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