Mr. Rudman Mohammed is the Chief Executive Officer of Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN), an organization connecting Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and community operators to change visitors among their networks. In this interview with SAMSON AKINTARO, he speaks about the recipes for reaching lower Internet fees in Nigeria and different industry troubles.
The center position we’re playing is to interconnect all Internet provider companies, all telecommunications corporations, instructional establishments, and actually, all corporations that are IP-centric. All enterprises which might be shifting Internet traffic can connect with the Internet Exchange Point. So, the position is to ensure that Internet site visitors being exchanged inside Nigeria stay inside Nigeria to hold net visitors local.
We have related all the major telecommunications companies and ISPs in Nigeria. Substantial parts of them are related to the change. Secondly, we have attracted global players who are coming to Nigeria to connect to the alternate. Again, neighborhood Internet traffic has expanded from zero.01 in line with the cent to nearly 30 consistent with cent proper now. The substantial part of what turned into going overseas is now dwelling within the country.
That growth is quite big, so for every carrier company, this is connected to the alternate—the shop 30 according to cent in their site visitors regionally and that quantity to charges saving. Furthermore, the service carriers linked to the trade have become Internet at a lower price than what is obtainable inside the marketplace.
But they have now not surpassed the saved price to the cease users due to the fact fee of the Internet is still high; why?
Yes, the value is attributed to a couple of elements. For an ISP, aside from the capital expenditure in putting in the infrastructure on the ground, they have a high operational price. The high operational fee includes the cost of running turbines due to the fact as an ISP, you need to run 24/7, and consequently, you need to spend a lot of money on power. You ought to lay fiber, in which you pay several cash to get Right of Way.
And then we’ve got the problem of multiple taxes that need to be paid. Recently, the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) and the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) complained that there are about 38 classes of taxes that their contributors commonly pay.
That makes it so complicated and difficult for them to operate. If you may study office hire, workforce income, and other price components, and then you definitely upload the bandwidth price, you may see why the price has not gone down for the give-up users.
This is because the bandwidth value is simply 10 to fifteen in keeping with the scent of their operating value, so even if you drop the fee to zero for them, they cannot honestly skip extensive quantity of price discount to the purchasers. So, if we will decrease other charges like government taxes and the rest, then the price will move down to stop customers.
Having mentioned challenges dealing with operators, what are the ones dealing with IXPN as the exchange factor?
We all proportion the same challenges, but ours is lack of enough content companies within us of a; we need more neighborhood content because the change in Nigeria takes place between the eyeball network and content networks, eyeball networks consist of all the big telecommunications networks and ISPs at the same time as the content material networks are the networks which have all of the records that reside on the Internet, just like the Yahoo, Google, Facebook Twitter, and all the relaxation and all the personal website hosting groups that host various websites. So, we need greater of that during Nigeria for Nigeria’s traffic to grow and thrive.
We are looking to see how a content material can live in Nigeria, particularly the authority’s content material, academic content material, and all that. When we began working in 2006, there were very few dependable information centers in Nigeria. But now you can see the evolvement of massive facts centers, tier three records centers a good way to be capable of dealing with the web hosting of something services you want to host in Nigeria and they have the reliability, which makes them have the global certification from Uptime Institute to ensure compliance to international widespread.
But for them to flourish, we want to start migrating all our data hosted abroad to host it locally. If we can obtain that, the price of the Internet will drop. In a manner, neighborhood connectivity will significantly improve.
The difficulty of cybercrime is affecting the image of Nigeria, and lots of international users don’t need to consider Nigerians online for any valid business; what do you believe you studied can be carried out to exchange this?
Nigeria has a picture that may not necessarily be proper. We all understand that the populace of Nigeria is big, so if a small percent of the population are doing bad matters, we shouldn’t see it as if the whole of the country is doing it. But because Nigeria as a rustic has no longer completed something about it, the problem is being amplified on the Internet. In fact, there are many other countries whose citizens are doing worse on the Internet. We also need authorities to interact with the youths so that they can have something viable to do as opposed to doing yahoo. The government has even discovered many the abilities to look at how they can expand their talents through potential construction and training to empower them to do legitimate agencies online.
In phrases of general cyber protection difficulty and the concern of commercial enterprise online, the danger can be minimized if you do the proper things. Right matters in which you don’t open unknown attachments, you don’t go to websites that can be fraudulent, and you replace your running gadget frequently, and you’re the usage of anti-virus. These are methods to shield yourself online, and that is extra about focus. The authorities need to provide extra recognition for the humans on the way to be safe online.
