By Prince Osuagwu

AT least six universities will by June next year have cheaper broadband connection, if the Universal Service Provision Fund, USPF, makes good its promises.

Executive Secretary of the Fund, Alhaji Abdullahi Maikano told Hi-Tech in Abuja at the weekend that connecting the universities was part of efforts to rebrand the USPF and reposition its activities, towards affecting common people positively by providing rural telephony, and easy, affordable broadband access.

Maikano revealed that other projects are also in the pipeline to ensure that Nigeriais ahead in Africa’s quest for economic survival through ICTs and connection to the internet.

The universities connectivity project, according to Maikano, targets 17 schools across the country, six of which would be fully up and running by June next year.

According to him, “we have rebranded USPF. In doing that we are looking at two areas — connectivity and access. Anything we are doing now, it is either connectivity, access or both. We have streamlined activities to focus mainly on these areas. In those days most people know USPF as providers of computers to schools. The ordinary individual doesn’t know there is something from us that can affect them positively. Today we are doing that by taking services to them.

University connectivity project

Over the years we have deployed several units of computers in schools and universities under the university connectivity project. but we have discovered that the universities, do not actually need computers because almost all the students have their own laptops. so we have quickly redesigned the project to take the shape of Bring Your Own Device, BYOD, model.

What we are doing now is connecting them with fibre, data centre and video-conferencing facilities. We are going to provide IP phone system within the schools, linking other extensions within the university environment with enough voice, video and data and they will make cheaper calls  on Internet Protocol, IP platform without their GSM phones.

We are targeting about 17 universities but by June next year,6 universities within the country will be fully running on this platform. These are the break in tradition which we are championing now”, he added.

5,000 km fibre optics in rural connection

Maikano added: “Another of our plan is to provide fibre optic cables to the rural areas. We know operators would not do it because of the low profit involved in rural areas. So here again, we are going to partner them. In the next one month we are going to deploy 5,000 km of fibre optic cables which would usher quick rural connection to under-served and unserved areas of our society.

We consider that over 60 percent of our people live in the rural areas. We are not going to be operators but we are creating clusters of these villages that we are going to discover and partner the operators, lower the entry level for them to attract them into going into those areas. Already we have broken these areas into clusters which is running into 23 or thereabouts. We will ensure that there is access in each of these clusters as we are assigning different operators and different services to a group of these clusters.”

Pact with operators

“In all these, we are running with major operators in Nigeria, who are actually showing genuine interest in these projects. However, there are certain discoveries we made which led us to have pacts with the operators that we are partnering in our latest activities.

For instance, we discovered that operators are skeptical to invest in the rural areas because of the time it will take to recoup even if they charge higher than they do in urban areas. So we have decided to deploy the equipment to lower their entry cost. In fact, we are targeting deployment of about 100 base stations in one year. But for operators, we have instructed that charges in service will be at the same rate as in the city and not higher as it ought to be, business wise.”