Telecommunications operators in Nigeria require about 60,000 active base transceiver stations, BTS, to ensure hitch-free service provisioning according to the government.
A member of the National Broadband Council, Jinmi Olanuiga has revealed.
Olanuiga who spoke at a one-day ‘Focused industry stakeholders’ forum and Hackathon award’ held with the theme: Universal Access: Eliminating: The Inclusion Barriers’ said currently, telecommunications operators only have approximately 25,396 mobile towers in Nigeria which is inadequate to cover the entire country.
MTN has about 10,000 towers; Airtel has 5,000; Glo has 4,000; IHS has 6,540; Etisalat has 600. The rest of the mobile towers belong to Helios Towers 1,300 while SWAP Telecom has 700. Approximately 14,222 owned by IHS and 1,300 by HTN Towers combined. Eighty five per cent of towers will be owned or operated by independent tower companies by 2016” he said.
He urged Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) to simplify, streamline goals and objectives for more effective delivery, align with the NCC eight point agenda and prioritise the universal provision of broadband, focus preferentially and aggressively on the deployment of 2G &3G enabled base stations in line with the minimum collocation standard of three per Base Station.
Ayuba Shuaibu, Secretary, Universal Service Provision Fund said “We have responded to these barriers to optimal implementation of our projects and sustainable partnerships with stakeholders. We seek increased participation of industry operators/service providers in universal access projects to accelerate coverage of unserved and underserved areas.”
