The Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr Isa Pantami, says the fifth-generation (5G) cellular networks will be deployed in January 2022.
The minister, who was represented by the NCC Commissioner for Technical Services, Ubale Maska, made the announcement at a town hall meeting in Maiduguri, Borno state, on Thursday.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reported that the meeting discussed ways to address the vandalism of power and telecommunications infrastructure.
The Federal Executive Council (FEC) two weeks ago authorised the deployment of 5G networks for Nigeria’s digital economy.
He said that the 5G technology would boost surveillance against criminal elements vandalising public assets across the country, adding that other measures should be put in place to arrest them and bring them to book.
Pantami explained that the need to deploy the modern system was due to the over 50,000 telecommunications sites across the country.
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He added that about 16,000 outages were recorded by mobile network operators (MTN, Glo, Airtel, 9mobile) between January 2021 and July 2021.
He said the outages were caused by fibre cuts, access denial and theft, leading to service disruption in the affected areas.
He condemned situations where telecoms installations were destroyed in terrorist attacks, which had not been replaced as a result of the intense security issues and tensions in northeast states.
Pantami asked the national assembly to speed up the passage of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Bill for onward submission to Muhammadu Buhari for assent.
