The Nigerian Communication Satellite (NigComSat) will provide the best and cheapest satellite services to subscribers within Africa, the NigComSat Managing Director, Alhaji Tumasaniyu Ahmed-Rufai, has said.

Ahmed-Rufai told newsmen in Abuja that the satellite had been designed to effectively focus on African with better reception. According to him, ”our services are better, our foot prints are better than any satellite that is over-seeing Africa. The design of the satellite also took into consideration the weather conditions of Africa.

“We narrowed the footprint of the satellite to make it regional so that we can have a higher power and spend less on customer premises equipment because small dishes can be used for perfect reception.”

He explained that customers would be spending half the amount of money they would have spent to get their works done since they could push two times more traffic than they are allocated. He said that more than 25 per cent of the cost of acquiring satellite bandwidth was as a result of middle-men, but that with NigComSat, customers could buy directly.

Ahmed-Rufai futher declared that for small and medium-enterprises that could not afford to go into long lease, there would be room for them “to pay about three months up-front and then issue a bank guarantee for repayment”.

He, however, disclosed that it would take about three to four years for the company to sell off 100 per cent of the satellite’s capacity after it was launched. According to him, this is so because most satellite customers go into long lease and as such, the would-be customers of NigComSat still had some years on their current satellite provider.