By Emmanuel Elebeke

THE Executive Vice Chairman of  the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta has decried the gap between  the National planned and national existing broadband fibre Infrastructure in Nigeria.

Danbatta, at the 16th  meeting of the Joint Planning Board and national Council on Development, in Minna, Niger state,  regretted that there is presence of deployed broadband fiber infrastructure in the country, which has not sufficiently covered the entire nation.

Delivering a paper titled: Achieving a Digitally-Led Growth through Information and Communications Technology, he noted that the gap between the National Planned and National Existing Broadband Fibre Infrastructure in Nigeria is critical to achieving broadband penetration target of 30% by 2018.

He stated that more than 10 terabytes of telecommunications capacity currently exists at the nation’s landing point, but pointed out that the challenge is the deployment of fiber infrastructure across the country to effectively distribute the capacity to all areas of the country for sufficient fiber capacity.  He however expressed optimism that Nigeria’s active  mobile-broadband  penetration has  increased within the   space of one year   from less than 10% in   2015 to 20.95% in 2016, putting Nigeria on the 128 position in the global ranking.