IT EDGE ROUND TABLE

The Nigerian ISP is….

Telephone subscribers are not the best friends of telecom operators but you can sometimes squeeze kind words from consumers for their network owners. But not so for the Internet service providers (ISPs). In the ISP sub-sector, kind words are rare. Consumers would rave and swear that they are still counting their losses from frequent downtimes. But are ISPs not being unduly maligned and the challenges facing them a reflection of the inadequacy within the entire telecom industry? For every consumer’s query, ISPs seem to have a waiting response in a sector where confounding challenges has made some of the most successful players to go under.

Participants

Dr Emmanuel Ekuwem

President of NIG, Teledom, KMI

Christopher Ajayi

Business Development Manager, 21^st Century Technology Limited

 Uche Oji

Corporate Affairs, Marketing & Development Manager, Linkserve

Lai Omotola,

COO, Next Technologies Limited & Chairman, Association of Cybercafe & Telecentres Operators

Gboyega Ojuri

CEO, Junisat

Segun Oruame

 Editorila Director, IT Edge

Bayero Agabi

Executive Editor, IT Edge

Bayero: Gentle men you are welcome to the third edition of IT Edge Round Table and in this special edition we are going to be looking at Competition, Technology and the Challenges of Delivering Quality Services in the Internet sub-sector. Let me start with Dr Ekuwem. Dr, you are the president of the Nigerian Internet Group [NIG], would you say as a nation, we have fully explored our Internet potentials?

Dr Ekuwem: We have not in the sense that if you relate where we are now to where we were five years ago we will say that we have made progress. But if you relate us to our peers worldwide, we are just starting to scratch the surface. You asked why?  One, Internet is a service and a tool for productivity. For you to be creative and for the Internet to assist you in whatever you do and be a service, it needs a platform on which to ride. So the Internet will go as far as the ISP infrastructure, in terms of network, enables it to flow. I have always said that Internet service will go as far as Linkserve’s infrastructure permits; as far as 21^st Century’s infrastructure permits; as far as Junisat permits, as far as the infrastructure of the national carrier or NITEL permits, the SNO, the PTOs, the fixed wireless operators, and then the ministry.  Internet will only flow through those pipes as made available by all these.

Two has to do with literacy. We cannot divorce literacy from Internet. Who are those that can use it? It is those who are aware of its use, who can use the keyboard, who know all the keys, the punctuations that can use the Internet. So literacy is a major prerequisite. What is the level of literacy level in Nigeria? Abysmally low. The third factor is that of awareness, you cannot miss what you never conceived of, what you’ve never been told about, what you’ve never seen and what you’ve never used.  We cannot start talking about Internet when majority of people don’t know what the Internet is all about. The fourth factor is rural/urban area dichotomy on Nigeria. Those who went to schools in rural areas, and were born in villages after they attend the university, what is going to happen? Because of inadequate public utilities, electricity, water, road networks and all that, they move to the towns so those who would have stayed and remain a vibrant force to test the efficiency of the Internet in their respective rural areas cannot be found there because of the inadequacies and insufficiency in the system. They logically migrate from rural areas towards the urban areas and have access to the Internet that remains meaningless to those in the rural areas. Nigeria’s population is about 77% to 80% rural that is marginalised in terms of access to full Internet. The so-called 20% to33% has to contend with the fifth factor, which is affordability.

Bayero: Would you then blame for these problems, the government or you professionals?

Dr Ekuwem: If you look at the five factors I have given you, the one of illiteracy I will blame on the doorstep of the government because it has a fundamental role to play in helping the citizens to be literates. Government has to create the enabling environment, encourage NITDA, NCS, NIG, ISPAN, ISPON and everyone trying to create awareness on the Internet so the blame is totally at the doorstep of government. On infrastructure, government has done a lot in trying to liberalise and deregulate and put a comfortable environment for everybody to play in the industry so I will leave it on that.  On infrastructures, I believe all of us are in it. We need to ask ourselves what exactly have we done as citizens and as investors.  Take the issue of electricity; universal access will be possible within the context of availability of power supply. Let me put it this way, if the NCC and federal government are doing well, NEPA is undoing everything they are doing. How would you talk of the spread of cybercafe, Wi-Fi, computer literacy, and distant education when the NEPA is not available or when supply of electricity is epileptic.

Segun: Linkserve, you more or less pioneered Internet service in the country, it was very expensive and very inaccessible then. Several years from then till now, it is still expensive and still inaccessible, and the infrastructural problems are still there? Would you then say that we have achieved anything in terms of Internet access or that there is something that the private sector investors have not done that an ordinary man in the street needs to enjoy cheap quality Internet access?

Uche: Essentially, Dr. Ekuwem captured it correctly. Let me go a little bit back and let you understand some of the problems. If you applying for an E1 line, it takes you one year to get it. After getting it, for you to even deploy it and use it, it takes you another one year so at the end of the year you are talking of two years before you can deploy just an E1 line to offer service to your customers and that is a very big problem. This problem has always been there.  I don’t think it has eased out despite all the things about deregulation and opening of the market. The customers will not likely get as much as they would have love to get. The spread of Internet might not be as we want it as long as those infrastructures are still where they are. The private operators, the ISPs can’t do much because they need to leverage on those infrastructures to offer to service to customers.

Bayero: Despite this problem, you are still in business why are you there?

Gboyega: The objective of Junisat is to give quality service. We came in as naïve initially to excel where others have failed. If you look at the wireless especially mine that is wireless broadband via VSAT, most of the vanillas, straight out of the box solutions are not meant for what they are being used for. You have your small KU band, 1.2meters dish, and getting to your home you want to use bandwidth from a shared group. The thing in Nigeria is because income per capital is low; everybody gets to use in a cafe something that is designed for home use.

Bayero: Is this enough reason for poor access and unaffordable service?

Gboyega: When you talk about access, there ought to be a platform to determine some measurement, something to determine how you will use the Internet? PSTN, dial up, VSAT, hot spots and all other links you can think of. How many people can actually afford the links in their houses? How many people can afford a laptop? How many people can afford desktop? You have to have a UPS, stabilizer and all those things when you are talking about Internet penetration. Those countries outside, they have the same issue as we do, they have cafes and things like that, the problem here is still the income.  There, they have PCs in their homes; they have sources of connectivity and whatever back up they want. It is not so here.

Segun: VSAT access is quite expensive. Dr, just before the launch of SAT-3 marine cable there was much expectation in Nigeria and all of Africa that there would be a significant change in how the continent connects to the Internet backbone. SAT-3 has been launched and we still can’t feel the impact. Why is that so?

Dr. Ekuwem: One it has to do with the monopoly of SAT-3 by Nitel and no one is sufficiently in a know of what is the content of agreement between Nitel as the host institution in Nigeria and the international partners.  Nitel still says it is their own in-house property, SAT-3 is monopolised by NITEL and for you to have access to it you have to do this and you have to do that, all at the whims and caprices of Nitel.  SAT-3 bandwidth is grossly under utilise, and something has to be done drastically about this. The second point is in support of what Gboyega said earlier.  We have no Internet Exchange Point [IXP] in this country. For me to send an email to my friend here in Lagos, even though my provider is Linkserve and the other person is 21^st Century, my package will have to hit New Jersey before coming across to Allen where my friend is, this is ridiculous.  We congest international capacity needlessly. A company has been given licence by the Nigerian Communications Commission to provide an exchange service and that is a good development. A lot of stakeholders within are convinced, that include the PTOs, the ISPs that it is the right thing. They want to keep local traffic local and allow only the international to go international.

Bayero: Chris, how similar or different is your experience at 21^st Century?

Christopher: To be very modest, I am taking a different approach given the kind of infrastructure we have massively invested on. For example, before we came into market there were infrastructural issues like you have said but we took the bull by the horn and instead of relying on anybody, since we had all the licenses, we got the necessary funding and decided to lay our own infrastructures. We started as an ISP and when we investigated the market we found out that 75% of corporate users were unhappy because most of the service providers then were not providing very good service and that was what informed our investing in fibre optics as a medium of service delivery.

Bayero: Are you saying that the issue of inadequate support infrastructure is blown out of proportion by ISPs?

Christopher: I won’t say that but from 21^st Century’s angle I think to a large extent we have provided infrastructure particularly within Lagos. I will mention some things that will interest you. Before we came into the market there was no bank that was doing Internet banking and the reason then was that there was no infrastructure. They couldn’t rely on the existing ISPs then. The first bank that played up Internet banking, First Atlantic Bank, came on our network and before anybody knew it they were deploying Internet banking solution, Platinum came after, then Diamond Bank and Prudent Bank. We have since impacted upon different industries and not just the banks. For example, the airline industry. Before we came into the market every stockbroker must, as a matter of compulsion, go to the floor of Stock Exchange to trade, when we came into the market we overhaul that and now anybody that is interested in trading remotely can do that via our own infrastructure.

Bayero: Your interest is just the heavy users?  I mean the corporate users.

Christopher: No, no…

Bayero: How does that impact on the ordinary man on the street?

Christopher: What we have also done for the ordinary man on the street is to crash the price of telephone service and our telephone comes with free Internet service.

Bayero: So you are a good beneficiary of government policies?

Christopher: Yes definitely! We are expanding aggressively to cable major commercial centers in Lagos, we just got into Surulere and if you see the kind of celebration the same thing happened in Ikeja, Apapa, Ikoyi and Lekki. We started in Lekki for strategic reason. Before we got into Lekki Phase 1, there was no cable infrastructure and what we did was to give everybody telephone lines and they all started to browse and that impacted on our business because we discovered that 50% of decision makers in VI and Ikoyi reside in those areas. 

Bayero: That is a push away from Junisat view on why Internet access is expensive. You are saying that the Internet can be…

Christopher: Free

Segun: In essence Internet access should be free?

Christopher: Actually and ultimately, that is what is going to happen and that is why you see most of the PTOs running over each other to provide this service for free.

Segun:  We are now in a market where all PTOs are now ISPs and some ISPs are now PTOs how have that impacted on your business?

Uche: It depends on what you are looking at. Actually when you are talking of Internet penetration you have to make some things clear. Are you talking about are you talking about Lagos? Chris is talking about Lagos. Internet penetration is not Lagos, Nigeria is a country of over 150million people; we have over 200 major towns. Why are we talking about Lagos?  I think that whatever we are talking about, we should take that into consideration; it should be essential that whatever service we are offering should be in a manner that it can reach people. If it doesn’t reach people then we haven’t achieved anything.  Presently, we sell Internet access a year for N25, 800. We have a service that you can actually use and dial into our network if you are using a dial up solution from anywhere in Nigeria. It will still boil down to the same thing we have said earlier. At the end of the day you need a NITEL infrastructure, a PTO’s or whatever to dial into our network. If you look at wireless broadband that Junisat offers which we also offer, it will guarantee fast Internet penetration in the country, but it is expensive. How many people can afford it? It is only being bought by cybercafes and because the solution is not too much geared towards what they are using it for, they cannot achieve optimum service with it. The average user in Nigeria gets access from the cybercafe, which because they are on 24 hours, the solution they pay does not fit into what they are they using it for. Those are the things we should look at. For us as a company we have reduced the price of Internet for dial up and we believe that for it to get to every Nigerian, it should be offered in a manner that people can dial into our network from everywhere in the country. The Internet is a mass-market thing and for everyone.

Bayero: Nigerians trust the offshore public domains, for instance yahoo.com, they trust hosting abroad than they do local hosting companies, when and how shall we back out of this?

Gboyega: We have talked about literacy and we even mentioned colonial mentality. One thing I found out is that the average Nigerian loves something that is from abroad. But also you must consider the operating cost here and abroad. Look at it a hosting company in developed market you pick up services easily and there is no fear of unwarranted downtime. For Junisat set up an office in Nigeria, it takes more effort and money.  You want to post something, posting means you have light 24/7 and that means you have a generator, a UPS, and whatever it must take to be on 24/7. When you look at the capital sunk into setting up, you know you cannot afford to do hosting at N140 per day. The income per capita here, even though, is low the running cost is extremely high because of lack of infrastructures. To me, I can’t see how we can compete with those that are hosting abroad, especially as you can get your laptop, pay the guy out there via credit card or something; some of them offer you free tools to actually do it and give you a control panel to your site. Hosting here is a nice thing but in reality,  can we compete against what is already an established market especially when you don’t need to travel so wide to initiate this.

Uche: We need to have everything in place to get things right.

Bayero: But Chris just said that the issue of infrastructure deficiency is over-hyped.

Dr Ekuwem: I listened to what Chris said.  21^st Century is a very good example of what the Nigeria Internet Group is talking about. 21^st Century’s target is corporate customers. Listen to him. He is quite clear. But Uche said Nigeria is not Lekki. Nigeria is not Surulere. Nigeria is not just Ikeja, VI and all that.  Look at the people in those places, they can afford a PC, they can afford a notebook, they can afford a telephone handset they can connect to 21^st Century Network.  But we are talking about factors that determine the affordability of Internet services for the generality of people or what others usually called provision of public utilities at homes. It is a shame on Nigeria that NEPA is not reliable so you buy a generator. If you are very power conscious you buy two generators so that one is on standby.  Internet penetration is all about the affordability of your service and the infrastructural preparedness of your customer.  Where is 21^st Century, where is Cyberspace? There service must be affordable within a coverage area of customers they are targeting and the customer must be infrastructurally prepared in terms of constant supply of  electricity and availability of PCs and notebooks and telephones. 21^st Century have been able to target some CEOs of some organisations who make decision and who live in the same area and who can afford the services that are even cheap. But the percentage of that population in relation to all of Nigeria is insignificant. That percentage is not economically insignificant but it is insignificant in terms of Internet penetration, Internet penetration not for me as Teledom but for me as Nigeria Internet Group. Internet is for everyone and you know what,  as WSIS is saying, access to full Internet is now considered a fundamental human right. What that means is that if access to Internet has become a fundamental human right, you are not infringing on but enforcing the fundamental human right of those Nigerians you are giving access in Lekki. But they only constitutes 0.9%, those who constitute 99.1% still do not have access to Internet service.

Bayero: Who is guilty of this human right abuse?

Dr Ekuwem: The person guilty of this human right abuse is that institution who is not able to respond to his responsibility as far as literacy is concern and availability of infrastructure. Like we say about web posting, you can always expect 21^st Century or Junisat or Teledom or any IT company to host someone’s website when the cost of availability is low and the manager can ensure that your site is always on, this is very important because nobody wants to double click and want to browse a site that is hosted in Junisat or 21^st Century and reaches that point where the host is unreachable because the web server is down as a result of no electricity.  if I do that and I am in Russia or China or anywhere in the world and I can’t browse Teledom website, I am going to change the provider immediately.  Two, how can this web server be available 24/7 and powered in-house by technical experts plus and can the affordability of pipe be ensured to the man on the street? This is very important because if you go to a lot of websites, your ability to access the sites depends on the capacity of the available bandwidth. In other words, is the bandwidth affordable?

Bayero: So what is responsible for this click and wait kind of service, are ISPs not trying to play on the intelligence of the end users?

Uche: Let me just say this. Most of the time the whole blame is heaped on the ISP…

Segun: We are looking at the speed.

Uche: The speed depends on your ability to pay for it. The average Nigerian consumer whether is a cyber café or a company or an individual wants to get, in most cases what he cannot pay for.

Bayero: How do you mean?

Uche: Somebody who is a running a cybercafe, for instance, with 30 computers prefers to take a bandwidth that is shared. He does not want to pay for a dedicated bandwidth option that will guarantee a type of service he requires. He prefers to pay nothing and in most cases when you give him what he wants, he complains. When you advise him professionally, he will not take the advice. Getting good service depends on your ability to pay for the service. The average Nigerian doesn’t want to pay for good service, may be because he does not have money to pay for it. He prefers to have half-baked service and at the end of the day, he further transfers this poor service to the people who are using it that doesn’t really come from the ISP because the ISP can sell the bandwidth that you require provided you can afford to pay for it.

Bayero: Junisat, how secured are the Internet transactions in Nigeria in the absence of Internet exchange point and lack of infrastructure?

Gboyega: At the moment, for majority of Internet users, security is not really an issue. For an average Internet user who is browsing, anybody can be listening; anybody can be sniffing your traffic. You may now look at the banking environment or other corporate entities where security is an issue. They have way round it. I am not involved in a corporate setting, so I don’t know what is available in terms of security, may be 21^st Century is going to tell us how much they have invested. 

Segun:  Let me be more specific.  Some ISPs have been disconnected by their upstream partners because of the massive number of scam mails originating from servers of these Nigerian ISPs; in fact, about three ISPs had that problem were shut out, Uche, how are ISPs addressing this problem?

Uche: Ordinarily, as an ISP you wouldn’t encourage your customer to send scam mails but how do you deal with it? Are you going to say the average man on the street should not send the mail that he wants to send? You are not going to do that because we are not going to monitor that. We offer service to a third party, the party in turn offers service to other people so I think it is a very big question you are asking me.  But at the end of the day,  I think if you are using the Internet whether you are in Nigeria or in abroad, you should be able to know what is a spam mail: a mail that is designed to extort money from you, you should be able to know that and deal with it. A lot of us (Nigerians) also get mail like that, they are junk mails, at the end of the day what you do is, you just delete it.

Segun: Invariably, you are saying when your upstream partners disconnect you, the problem has nothing to do with you and there is nothing that ISPs can do here to checkmate Spam mails originating from the cybercafe?

Uche: The only thing you can do is to educate your customers.

Christopher: Let us look at it within the context of IT Edge. Everybody here has a PC set up within a network to a server, you have a web access and you can actually use your PC to link up with me and whatever you send me hits my server and it goes out to the Internet. There is a way of stopping it, there is a product called Minesweeper. What it does is to look at the mail look for certain words that means something, that appears like a virus, it opens a memory, read its and detects some look-out signs, that mail doesn’t go anywhere. Now, let us look at yahoo.com, yahoo.uk, hotmail.com they are all hosted in US, if something goes off, there is nothing you can do about it because it goes off to Atlanta or wherever the server is. How do you fight that kind of thing?  The guy who is sending the Spam can be sitting down in India using Segun or whatever name that doesn’t make him a Nigeria. The only way you can check it is at yahoo or hotmail servers.

Uche: It is also important to know that most Spam mails are not sent from ISP domains, they are actually sent from yahoo, hotmail and all third parties, you cannot really trace them unless you use an IP address.

Segun:  Dr, apart from being the president of NIG you are also in the Cybercrime Working Group, are there ways your group is to address this problem?

Bayero: Are you also worried that the president’s email will first hit abroad before getting back to Nigeria?

Dr Ekuwem: Yes! If it is having a generic name www.com or yahoo.com or hotmail.com depending on where his mail server is listed. If it is yahoo.com or hotmail.com it is going to hit the mail server of yahoo.com or hotmail.com before coming back here, so private security is nil there What matter, for instance is where the mail server is for  www.obasanjo.com. Who is hosting it for him? On the issue of cyber crime and spam mails, if you are having a yahoo.com account or hotmail.com account you can access the Internet world of your geographical location, so it may a cybercafe in Libya or Japan or Canada. To be hosted on the Internet, you need a properly defined domain name address, that domain name address has an IP, there is an IP associated with it and like you have said very correctly all the ISPs are second parties because the first party is the provider and the second parties are the poor innocent ISPs. The third parties are the cybercafe operators. Take for instance a cafe on Allen Avenue with only one IP address, there is a proxy server and a distributor within the cybercafe and somebody walks in there and browses and sends Spam mails, with IP address behind a proxy server you will trace it up to that point from anywhere in the world. So the optic fibre is correct to trace the route this particular email as one that has originated from a source with IP address in that cafe. The question is this: can you blame the cybercafe operator? Is he to physically go round looking at peoples’ shoulder? Don’t forget we have lawyers in our committee, there is a law on privacy in Nigeria; you don’t read people’s mails. If you read someone’s letter, it is criminal, it is trespassing, according to them [lawyers]. So you are not going to see a cybercafe operator who is your second party customer looking over every customer that is busy browsing.  The only way is to use what I will call the cat-words, the recurring words in a typical Spam mail. The words include NNPC, Central Bank, oil well, Obasanjo, Atiku and names of the 36 governors all well programmed in a piece of software that is stored in a main server of a cybercafe operator; all scam mails leaving the cybercafe with those cat-words can be shredded.  There is a new cybercrime draft bill to address the problem and empower the ISPs and cybercafe operators to be able to look over the shoulders of those browsing. But then, even if you are able to look over the shoulder how do you enforce this because it is like somebody saying all letters in  the General Post Office, Ikeja be read or look at it this way, can we regulate free speech? I made the statement in one of the meetings at the Villa and the DIG in our committee said no law enforcement agency goes around sniffing what ABC is doing but the moment that ABC makes himself worthy of suspicion, he is kept under watch. He also said to enforce the law; you have to break the law. If someone is over speeding on the highway, and the police want to apprehend that person, if the person is driving at 140km the police must at least, go at 141km in order to be able to get him.

Bayero: Chris, how secured are the packets you carry?

Christopher: Very secure.  We control over 18% Internet service to the banks and they run some mission critical application on our network. So the first consideration is security.  For example, when we were about signing City Bank, we flew in a consultant who inspected our infrastructure and the guy certified it okay; that this network is secure enough. We have invested massively in security infrastructure, firewalls, name it such that is one of the most secured network center in Nigeria we are also building the largest data recovery center in West Africa and as of today, we have gotten commitment of 60% of the banks because they know that they have done business with us and they are very happy about it. Another good thing is we already have fibre optics cable laid into nearly all the offices of banks to carry that same traffic out to our data centre. 

I want to say something about Internet penetration we were talking the other time. We as a country may be a bit slow but there is something I want to mention that my interest all of us. I was shocked when a cousin of mine went to check his JAMB result and came back home to tell me that they are saying he can not physically check the result, that he should buy scratch card and access JAMB server online.  If you look at some pocket of initiatives, you will see that this thing is really penetrating. They might not be highly reported or celebrated but you will be shock that if this infrastructure is in rural areas, our illiterate relations will embrace it. A very good example is the way they have handled GSM operation, there are some old women in the village that they can now communicate very well and even send text message. The moment the infrastructures get to some of these rural areas, you would be shocked that illiteracy might not be a major factor after all.

Bayero: Would you say the same of local content and value added service?

Christopher: What do you mean by local content?

Bayero: Local content in the sense that all we do download most of the time.

Christopher: You know it is a value driven thing. For example, I remember when I was in Linkserve, we created a job portal for the unemployed people in town. We were amazed by the kind of response we got from people. So it depends on the value added that the organisation is providing.

Bayero: Dr Ekuwem on the issue of the local content would you say that we have felt very well?

Dr Ekuwem: We have failed abysmally. When you enter a typical Nigerian cybercafe, all the websites of this entire world from Asia, America, Europe and all that are the most visited.  What I do very often at a cybercafe in Abuja airport, I will sample all the work stations there and you know what, 95%, at times 100%, of the websites that were browsed by customers before are all none-Nigerian websites. I repeat, none is Nigerian. You have said it correctly, download syndrome is what is taking place here. Internet is a global platform for global meeting, everyone is expressing himself. All we do here is download other people’s expression of their own identity.  Like my friend from Junisat said colonial mentality, Fela Anikulapo Kuti put it in a better way when he said we suffer from “colomentality.”  Sugar from outside Nigeria is more sugary than sugar made in Abeokuta and that is bullshit.  In the cyber world, your identity is your website; that you are born uniquely with a unique domain name.  If we don’t have a domain name, it is like someone who went to the market and when he got to the market, he put a tarpaulin over his wares. Why is he in the market?  There was this exhibition in Abuja, a lady was there exhibiting fashion designs and I was annoyed. I almost blasted the organiser who was part of my team because it was an ICT event and I could not fathom what the lady was doing with beautiful dresses. But the lady said to me, Dr I am here to make consultation on how I can show my wares to the world because I want to have a domain name and have a website to launch my goods to the global market. She owns a shop now in Ajao Estate, she has a website and she is selling at Australia. There is a guy at Awolowo Roundabout, he paints very well. Just sit down as Segun, and he will paint you. You must have seen him exhibiting pictures of Abiola, Tinubu and Obasanjo is as if is a photograph. I asked that boy last week if he had a website and he said no. Next week,  he will be at the NIG secretariat to have domain name and have website. Whether you are George Bush or John Kerry, send your portrait to him, he will paint you; that is local content. So our developers, all of us, have failed including Teledom. We ought to have our domain names register. We have to develop a local content, whether you are a teacher, professor, a stadium an airline, hospital whatever,  have your domain name registered under the domain name of .ng.  Nigeria must have a more virile presence in the cyberspace.

Why should the creative, the productive, the hardworking not have a website. Why don’t we develop our local content to showcase the best in us?  Wole Soyinka where is your website, the registered companies, family groups, the 774 local governments, 36 state governments, the federal and state agencies. Just imagine all these are online, the excessive downloading will be reduce and there will be more of uploading from this part of the world.

Segun: Dr, is the NIG looking at ways of influencing government to make it mandatory for all government agencies to have their websites?

Dr Ekuwem: We are already looking at that beginning with our AGM this year.  We are working in conjunction with the NCC on next year’s African Internet Summit. The major theme of African Internet Summit is local content development. If you also remember NITDA had an event for top civil servants, permanent secretaries and managing directors of government parastatals in line with this objectives. We have booked an appointment to see the governors and we shall be making a presentation to that effect. We shall be meeting all the local government chairmen because we are so worried about this problem. I thank for this question because this download is too much. 

Bayero: What is responsible for this local content deficiency, could it be lack of competence or awareness?

Gboyega: It is lack of competence. I can give my example, many years back the first problem I have was to write a programme. I also remember standing behind a PC and being told that this was a computer, that was a screen. The same thing can be said of many people. A lot of people hear about computers, my average brother, my average sister still sees the computer as a big deal. If you touch it, it is going to bite you. When you talk of local content, I was looking round for my kids just come back to Nigeria; do you believe that little story that our grandma used to tell us by the ‘Olurombi’ and all those folk tales, I could not find one book and I could find none anywhere on the Internet to download for my children. These do not require high knowledge of technology. They are simple things like story telling, Nigeria stories, you start with Nigerian folktales you should be able to get a list of them. Do a list of 419, believe me you will have something like 100 and something pages. Talk of native doctors, when they are dying they hand over to somebody else; a lot of our elders are dying with our culture, most of us that traveled out and didn’t grow with our parents, there is no opportunity to learn most of these things. If we had them on the web, it would help to propagate our culture. You want to know about Russia? Just type it tonight and you will get to have a lot of facts on Russian, try that on Nigeria, you get nothing.

Bayero: The Internet service providers say cybercafes operators do not pay for sufficient bandwidth and that explains why you operators cannot satisfy your customers. Is this correct?

Lai: If the ISPs are saying that I am also part of ISPs. I was part of the commissioning of ISP in those days. It is interesting that they have to say that but before I answer them I will try and lay a little bit of foundation with the history of Internet in Nigeria. When Internet first came, we set up the first cybercafe at a boys quarter inside the University of Lagos. All we just had was a dial up from Ross Clayton; what he offered us then was just email and that was the first cybercafe. We went to the street of Lagos telling people to subscribe to email address; they didn’t believe us and we just had one single email address. Because we had an analog phone, the only thing we could do is to wait till evening. We would type everybody’s letters, wait till evening and send them through just one email box and then wait for them to reply. When they replied us and we showed the customers and tell them that the person they sent email had actually replied you and with the evidence, it became very interesting as they saw that the thing could actually work. We were charging N1, 500 for an email address.  We were doing that close to eight months because the analog phone in Akoka was the only one available and it was very difficult to get access due to Nitel’s problem in those days. When a company came up which was called Supernet, they came to offer fast wireless solution at a time a lot of people didn’t believe that you could have Internet access without Nitel phone because it was a new technology.  Supernet came and said theirs was ten times better than Nitel. They were charging N80, 000 for bandwidth and N234, 000 for equipment and this was the beginning of Internet penetration in Nigeria because when we had dial up we can only used one system as it was difficult to network systems. But when Supernet came the first cybercafe with twenty computers came up. We allowed everyone access, whether they knew about computer or not, to go to the system and browse for 24 hours and the whole place was jam-packed.  Supernet soon had problems, they had envisaged to have about 200 customers but ended up 5000. People that had paid for six months for subscription could not get access and they started bombarding Supernet with policemen. Supernet went down not because they were no customers but they had excessive demand. As at the time Supernet was going down, another one came up which was called Prodigy.  Prodigy came up with another solution and increase Internet access by over 200%. People were paying millions to get Internet equipment to be installed to get access and cybercafe started paying close to N200, 000 a month just to have access. Prodigy did not last two years before they went totally down.  There is no ISP in this country that can say that in the past three years it has rendered quality service without any problem. One of the major features of an ISP is epileptic service. You can imagine a cybercafe coming up and putting up a banner that we are now open; the same cybercafe operator before he gets inside, the server is down and the link is down.  I want to be shown an ISP in Nigeria that has rendered service to the customer in the past one year without a downtime.

Bayero: What is the frequency of that down time?

Lai: Extremely high and worst than NEPA…

Christopher: No! No! I am from the 21^st Century…

Lai: I will get to your history…

Christopher: You know you are making some fundamental allegations. I am not saying we did not have downtime but it is very, very minimal and that is why today we have over 80% of the Internet market for serious users and you’ve never seen my advert in papers. What could have accounted for that? Medium of service delivery is fibre, which is very efficient. You understand if competitors are putting full page advert colour and they are not doing as well as they are claim that means something is responsible and could only be with service. We are up 95%of the time.

Lai: Before you went into fibre optics you are shooting on microwave radio. Before fibre optic when you first started your Internet access operation, you were giving Internet access via radio.

Christopher: Not via radio because we had invested in fixed wireless access, we have a hub in Surulere on 3.5 gigabytes even before government licensed other people and when other ISP were running on 2.4 we were already on 3.5 and we were servicing over 70% cybercafes in Lagos.

Lai: It is very important for us to know the historical background of this technology. One of the mistakes we have made in this country which is still the same mistake we are making and what has brought up a lot of mess in this industry today is that everybody sees telecommunication as something they can just jump into. Majority of telecom operators are businessmen and not engineers or telecom engineers. I give you example, the first set of people that brought in radio and antennas where are they today? The guy in Otigba sees that radio and Internet are selling, he looks for a credit card from somewhere and he begins to bring them from abroad and if your own omni directional antenna is N25, 000, wants to sell his own for N15, 000 because he uses credit card and a lot of genuine people that sell these things are gone because they can not meet up with the competition of what the Igbo boys are now selling. You see the history of this thing is very important because as at the time Prodigy went down, it went down with a lot of customers who till today are still in court claiming their trapped millions of Naira. When cybercafe decided that instead of receiving service from local ISPs, they too could go and shop where these people shop for Internet access, they decided to leave ISPs. If you look at this very well, you will see that this was when a lot of mast started coming up and all of a sudden people stopped erecting masts and they moved into VSAT.  At this stage, people didn’t bother about dial up neither did they want radio but they wanted VSAT. Then the Israelis came in to siphon money from Nigeria as they started bombarding us with different kinds of equipment. With nobody to advise the cafe operators, you end up buying a modem and not up to two months, the modem exploded.

Bayero: So you are saying the ISP has failed?

Lai: It is not even an issue of whether the ISP has failed or not, the issue is whether an average ISP understands what it means to be an ISP?

Uche: Clearly let me make a comment. I don’t want to look at his analysis in terms of history, may be when he has the time to capture the history again he will capture it differently. He raised something about cybercafes going to buy, why are they buying ? Do you know what you are buying? Why have they decided to go and buy may be they feel that the ISPs are expensive I don’t know but the truth of the matter…

Bayero: He said the downtime is more frequent than NEPA downtime.

Uche: At the time that there were issues of downtime with cybercafes was actually when everybody was using wireless and they were giving service on 2.4 frequency and there were a lot of interference. Most companies also left that to concentrate on giving VSAT. Even now, because of price is a determining factor, most buyers do not listen to professional advice and at the end of the day, he buys from Alaba, why should you buy from Alaba? Why should you buy from Otigba, irrespective of whether you are an ISP or you are just a trader?

Bayero: Junisat how much of this do you understand?

Gboyega: I understand all the issues of the cybercafe operators. This guy paid for shared platform, he wants do this and that and if you analyse what is going on in his cybercafe, it is more than the shared platform he paid for. Those in the cafe, are they chatting, are the majority of them just doing yahoo, hotmail and the likes?  I really want to see how much voice I am running per time ATTP or whatever, all on a shared protocol. Often, the activities are heavier than what is available on a shared protocol. We try to give you something to share on our network, we use different technologies, we have to move forward, we have got bandwidth bank dynamically so as to moderate what people do so we can guarantee you good service.

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