The Nigeria Broadcasting Commission (NBC) said it has secured the commitment of a South Korean technology firm to build set-top boxes (STB) in-country to prosecute the country’s digital switch over (DSO).
Its Director-General, Is’haq Modibo Kawu, who spoke on the sideline of Telecoms Leadership Summit organised by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in Lagos, also said the Federal Government has okayed fresh N30billion for the programme.
He said the Commission has completed the digital mapping of the whole country, a development that will enable it to deploy transmission facilities.
Kawu said: “Over the last three months, we were in discussion with a company from South Korea and they have accepted to come and put in place facilities to produce one million set-top boxes in Nigeria so that, we can have the boxes that will serve for the rollout of DSO in different locations, especially Lagos and Kano which are major centres.
According to him, this is a milestone in the journey to achieving analogue switch off in the country because the Chinese OEMs earlier approached over the set-top-boxes insisted on payment of cash before service.
“What we did in the last couple of months is to conclude a couple of things, first of all to finish the digital mapping of Nigeria. That means we now have a total plan for all the points and locations where we are going to have transmission facilities, the major population centres in the entire country. If you look at the demography of Nigeria right now, majority of Nigerians for the first time in history now live in the urban areas and so, what we have decided to do is to look at taking bits of broadcasting to all these major population centres. In the past, we started with regional rollout so we choose a state in a geo-political zone but with the digital maps in process, we now have all the major population centres,” he added.
He said over the next 25 months, the Commission is working out the possibility of doing the regional plan on how it should be and be able to launch in Lagos and Kano, the most important population centres in Nigeria as well as the most important economic locations in the country.
“The Federal Government is also working on the possibility of actually releasing to the NBC a total sum of N30 billion in two folds, a N15 billion and another N15 billion, which we will repay from the resources coming out from the frequency.
“The issue about target that we were all fidgeting about has actually moved on because the whole thing is that, in the context of West Africa, are we rolling out in such a way that it will not affect other countries? We are far ahead of the countries around us because it is usually the problem of trans-border in signals and that is not the problem we have now,” he said.
Source: The Nation
