By Chris Uwaje
Broadband and Broadband Divide (BBD) is here! Download, Download, Download – when will Nigeria start to upload creative digital content into the global IT knowledge space? The first equation for today’s knowledge-sharing lesson is: “Broadband without accelerated indigenous software engine, applications and local content equals 21st Century Digital Slavery”.

Nations that fail to develop and protect their indigenous electronic sovereignty knowledge sphere will NOT survive this 21st Century – this much has been confirmed by Stuxnet Cyber Worms Bomb targeted at Iran’s nuclear project (what we – as Informatics students —  knew will happen several decades ago!).

The e-knowledge battle field had been drawn and will be fiercely fought along the cyberspace mines carefully planted in the Cloud!. There will be no room for snail speed nations with lame-duck, lay-back attitude. They will not only be left behind – nay, they will be crushed for ever and thrown into the dustbin of history!

Migrating from bit-centric ‘Narrowband’ to Broadband?  Broadband Internet access, a.k.a. “broadband”, means different things to different people and indeed to many organizations and nations of the world.

To some, it is just another flash in the pan of human development era — code name ‘Information Technology Evolution’ (ITE), whereas to other nations, it is a life and death affair bordering on national survivability and the protection of generations yet unborn. Yes, it has become a hyper-critical life-business affair with conscious multi-dimensional seriousness.

Within the ICT Industry and IT Profession, broadband is simply understood as high data rate connection to the Internet. The core issue is about ‘Data transfer rate through a medium’ – usually called ‘Pipe’ (Vision Pipe, dream Pipe, e-Knowledge Pipe, Innovation Pipe) by trenchers. By comparison, bit-centric narrowband — usually identified by dial-up access using a 56k modem. Dial-up modems which are limited to a bit-rate of less than 56 kbit/s (kilobits per second) and require the dedicated use of a telephone line — whereas broadband does not require a dedicated telephone line and it more than doubles the rate of data transfer..

Although various minimum bandwidths have been used in definitions of broadband, ranging up from 64 kbit/s (Kilobit per second) up to 4.0 Mbit/s (Megabit per second) the 2006 OECD report typicaly defines broadband as having download data transfer rates equal to or faster than 256 kbit/s, while the United States (US) Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as of 2010, defines “Basic Broadband” as data transmission speeds of at least 4 megabits per second (Mbps), or 4,000,000 bits per second, downstream (from the Internet to the user’s computer) and 1 Mbit/s upstream (from the user’s computer to the Internet). The trend is to raise the threshold of the broadband definition as the marketplace rolls out faster services.

Data rates are defined in terms of maximum download because several common consumer broadband technologies such as ADSL are “asymmetric”— supporting much slower maximum upload data rate than download.

The other side of broadband therefore, is indeed about the survivability of the Nigerian Nation — midway, before the almighty nature dismisses half of this 21st Century (2050).
*CONTINUES NEXT WEEK.