Mr Ikoh,  a communications consultant, wrote from Lagos

Before the landing of Glo 1 as Globacom’s submarine cable is called, in Lagos, the only undersea broadband infrastructure available was the SAT-3 which was jointly owned by several countries in Africa. Glo therefore single-handedly positioned Nigeria on the world technology platform.

Thanks to the contributions of Glo, today, the telecoms sector has made a complete curve from start up. Services are better, products have increased from basic calls to 3G–based video streaming, video calls, mobile TV and the works.

The telecoms market is not just everywhere and available to all income bracket in the country, telecoms services have moved way beyond voice calls. Now Nigerians can track their cars by mobile phone, check their mails on the move, watch TV from their palms, and do banking transactions remotely. It has been a full cycle from no service at all to state-of-the-arts sophistication. Now we wonder how we ever survived not just without the mobile phone, but without telecom powered communications platforms.

Today, internet is a lot seamless and fluid in homes and offices. Internet based communications like “pinging”, “tweeting” and “chatting” have almost taken over social communications.

Research, news dissemination and data storage have moved to cyber space and businesses have gone on-line, real time at the speed of light. Thanks to the technological boost that companies like Glo brought into the ICT sphere in Nigeria. The up-to-date infrastructure of the telecoms companies has made everything mobile, from talk to banking, browsing, music, news coverage and dissemination to video.

Evidence supports the assertion that Glo led the way in all these advancements. Glo brought the stimulus, the competition and in most cases, was the first to introduce the technology.

The landing of Glo1 and its like has increased bandwidth and speed in the cyber sector. Glo was the first to move up to GPRS, 2.5G , and 3G, networks and currently only Globacom, among the telecoms firms, offer everything under one shop, that is mobile, fixed, fibre optic backbone, international termination (gateway services), internet service and international fibre optic backbone all under one roof making Globacom the only one-stop telecoms shop in the country. With this, the company seals its dominant place and potential as Nigeria’s joker for telecoms and ICT advancement.

As a Nigerian company, Globacom holds a big promise for the country. If encouraged, the company may be the key to placing the country on the world telecoms infrastructure map and Nigeria may soon become a big hub for telecoms exports. As a country, we may gain more political leverage in the comity of nations with operations not only in Africa but in the middle East and Asia. Nigeria may then become a voice in the world, doing for the world’s largest Black nation, what Aljazeera has done for Qatar and the Arab World; what Nokia has done for Finland, what DSTV has done for South Africa. Instead of the country wasting funds on white elephant dreams like the Nicomsat telecoms satellite that crashed a few years ago, encouragement to indigenous companies may be a better way to go in our search for a voice in the world.

Such encouragement should come in the form of protection from political harassment, protection from harmful external competition and rebates on the basis of being an indigenous entity.

South Africa is another example of a country that protects its own. I do not know which big Nigerian corporate entity has been able to compete on an even turf in South Africa, without coming against huge opposition and negative sentiments if not outright hostility. While we do not advocate a tit-for-tat with our neighbours and hostility against foreign investments, we should at least offer some advantage to local operators that show promise.

Every country , including the biggest free nation, the USA, protects its indigenous corporations like it did against the Japanese car manufacturers some years back .

Such playing field for indigenous firms will see such firms making more profit that remains in the country and not flighted abroad; and will see such companies spending on local projects that will better the collective fortunes of the people, which is exactly what Glo is doing- sponsoring the national teams, among other things, to bring further pride to the nation. The strides of Globacom definitely are strides for Nigeria.