By  Prince Osuagwu
It’s tough being an entrepreneur in Nigeria. The environmental challenges are so severe that any business man in  Nigeria needs to contend with the unavailability of critical resources including power and water supply.

*Ahmad Farroukh, MTN CEO

Typically, an entrepreneur, no matter his area of business, may have to generate a huge chunk, if not all, of his electricity and if he happens to be into any form of production or manufacturing, he would also need to generate his own water supply as well.

These are some of the most basic problems which small and medium scale enterprises and some larger enterprises, need to confront on a daily basis. Again, the problem of mobile broadband access, reduces the SMEs here to mere local entreprenuers when their counterparts abroad are trading globally. The bandwidth is costly and the internet penetration is all time low.

These problems, however, do not confront SMEs in other parts of the world including many developing countries.
In many parts of the world, entrepreneurs, are increasingly embracing mobile broadband and emphasis continues to revolve around how best to optimize it to boost business productivity and ultimately impact positively on the bottom line.
Mobile broadband in the simplest terms is synonymous with what the cellular phone is to the fixed line phone. In essence, it is about having Broadband Internet accessible on the go. Mobile broadband makes the internet, mobile and amenable to lots of uses that would have been impossible where access is restricted by place.

Meanwhile, one of the commonest ways of making the Internet mobile, has been through the use of Wi-Fi hotspots. Wi-Fi stands for “wireless fidelity” and Wi-Fi hotspots are locations in which wireless Internet exists and is available for use by consumers. Such access is usually through laptops or Personal Digital Assistants, PDAs.

However,  Wi-Fi hotspots are like the oases that occur in the desert. As one moves from place to place, his laptop connects from one Wi-Fi hotspot to another. But in between the vast expanses of unconnected air, where there is no Wi-Fi signal, the laptop remains unfortunately, unconnected.

It is at this point that WiMax, the  technology which helps to ensure that the laptop remains connected across vast expanses of land, becomes necessary. WiMax combines the mobility of the typical cellular phone with a massive improvement on Wi-Fi to deliver broadband that is continuously available over wide distances.

Obviously, WiMax is a crucial tool in facilitating access to the internet especially in developing countries and particularly vital for the SME sector which faces all manner of challenges including expensive access to the Internet.
Despite the challenges which entrepreneurs typically go through in this part of the world, the Internet serves as a sort of leveler, helping to ensure that SMEs are to a large extent, privy to the same global information base as their counterparts in developed countries.

The Internet itself plays a crucial role in the business of the entrepreneur in facilitating connectivity, particularly these days when the SMEs do not need  to install fax machines or travel to Nitel offices to receive Telex and radio messages from their local or international business partners.

By being connected to the Internet the SME is able to connect in real time with business partners both locally and internationally and also conduct sundry business transactions with his bank like checking for instant account balances, transferring funds from one account to another and conducting several other transactions from the comfort of his office.

It is actually, this advantage that MTN Nigeria, last week, said it was plugging into, to unleash among Nigeria’s entrepreneurs, especially those in the SME segment its WiMax technology. It promised to deploy the technology in key cities across Nigeria, beginning with Ilorin the Kwara State Capital.

Officially deploying the WiMax service, which it has branded MTN Hynet, in Ilorin last week, MTN’s Chief Enterprise Solutions Officer, Derek Appiah, stated that the service had been carefully designed with the needs of the SME in mind. He added that a considerable chunk of SMEs may not be able to readily afford other modes of Broadband available in the market, prompting his company to go for the WiMax option.

Also highlighting the benefits of Wimax to the SMEs, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, Bola Akingbade, noted that the MTN Hynet service combines the speed and reliability of fixed Broadband Internet with the convenience and flexibility of a mobile Internet service.

He however added that consumers also have a choice of either a pre-paid or a subscription service as the superior efficiency of the WiMax technology, makes download speeds very high and the Internet experience, a delight.
In addressing the specific needs of the SME, MTN’s Hynet service is said to offer multi-user functionality, meaning that an SME with about 20 staff could simply subscribe to the service and have all of its 20 staff seamlessly connected to Broadband Internet with the added convenience of having eliminated cables of all sorts.

So far, MTN has achieved this in such key cities as Ilorin, Lagos, Kaduna and Warri. This informs its strategy of launching the service in a staggered format beginning with Ilorin.

No doubt, other cities will follow suit in a short while. Wi-Max is based on open-standards and its technology is interoperable. It was conceived and built for internet applications, services and security and with architecture specifically designed to seamlessly expand the scope of the Internet to mobile users. Because it is built on Internet Protocol (IP) Networking, it supports all the latest IP security and quality of service standards.

At a time when major Nigerian-driven cross- Atlantic submarine cables are berthing in Nigeria with huge volumes of Internet bandwidth, obviously, the launch may have positioned MTN strategically, to ensure that such Internet bandwidth, when it eventually becomes available, is deployed in a manner that will impact positively on the engine-room of Nigeria’s economy, the Small and Medium Scale Enterprises, SMEs.
However, it is not only the SMEs that stand to benefit from MTN’s deployment of WiMax, however. Because of the liberality and sheer freedom which it personifies, WiMax is amenable to just about any use that is founded on mobile Broadband. Music or video streaming and academic field researches would, get the best of uses in the robust platform.

MTN says its Hynet service is a big step forward in the quest to help minimize the challenges that entrepreneurs face even while optimizing their productivity and helping to ensure that their services ultimately retain considerable quality comparable with their counterparts world over.

But it is also left to be seen if the growing acceptability of Long Term Evolution, LTE, which is touted to be a faster mode of mobile internet access, based on 4G platform, would not pose a challenge. Although, Hi-Tech gathered that top discussion are seriously on-going now to endsure that the two technologies shake hands instead of competing with each other.