Paul
Jaikaran is Chief Technical Officer (CTO) of MainOne
Cables. Prior to his appointment at MainOne, Jaikaran was the CTO of GSTelecom,
Vodacom Business Africa and ipNX. He started his career in networking with the
Shell Petroleum Group some 23 years ago. As the CTO, Paul is responsible for
all technical activities for MainOne. He recently gave audience to some ICT
journalists on some germane industry issues.
Bankole
Orimisan was there. Excerpts...
How
will you access the clamour for nationwide broadband penetration in Nigeria?
I think
there is a significant improvement if we look at the historical data from the
days when we had the NITEL network (when you had to pay an arm and a leg for a
single telephone and you hear a lot of cracking on the line). Now we have moved
from 400,000 lines from 2001 and 138 million phones in 2013 and a leapfrog
effect in form of technology.
The
Ministry of Communications Technology is a key driver with various initiatives
such as the Smart State initiative. The aim of the Smart State initiative is to
convince the governors, state officials and federal officials to ensure that
operators don't get taxed over the top and provide ways and means to get them
building broadband infrastructure.
One of
the main things is to ensure that the right incentives are put in place for the
right providers who are willing to roll out fibre networks. It's not easy, I
think Lagos State led the way by dropping their own Right of Way cost but
that's only one thing, there are a lot of other things that needs to be
addressed so that all providers, MainOne inclusive, can continue to grow and
provide quality broadband services in the state.
How can
the Broadband Council encourage other states to adopt the 'Smart States' initiatives?
I am
not so sure that the governors and their advisers can see the benefits. I think
you need to be able to see the benefits that broadband will give you. If you
don't see that benefit initially then it's going to be hard to convince someone
that broadband expansion in his state will actually do something in terms of
revenue, but they have to be convinced.
One of
the things that we did is work with the government of Lagos State to get some
certain areas in Lagos connected and it's something the state can see tangible
benefits from with respect to connectivity; talking about job creation,
connecting schools, hospitals among others. If you can get the major government
MDAs connected; communications, agriculture, health, trade and investment, they
will be far more efficient and able to work well together.
With
Nigeria estimated to have over nine terabytes bandwidth capacity, accessing the
Internet is still very very costly and tough. As an operator, why is this so?
From a
cost perspective, bringing the cable to the shores of Nigeria is one thing, but
how do you get the services (e.g. Internet) out to the other states? One of the
things that we need to look at is cheap national long distance service. If we
can do that, then there is no stopping the submarine pipe that is sitting at
the Lagos shores from getting to any state in the country. However the cost
from the telecoms operators going from Lagos to Abuja and further up is very
high; it's higher than the cost for MainOne to take the capacity from Lagos to
London. This does not really help the broadband initiative.
The
second issue is what I call the access network. Imagine I have taken the pipe
all the way to Gombe, one of the big problems when you think about those
locations is how much money you are going to invest to roll out a broadband
fibre network versus how much revenue you will get back. It's a small
population there in the rural setting then the amount of money you are going to
get back is not going to be enough to cover your cost. That's where subsidy
will come in, if the government really wants the rural areas to be connected
then they would have to subsidize.
That's
the only way it's going to work because the telecoms operators will look at it
from a capital investment and they'll say 'I am not going to invest a whole lot
of base stations to cover the entire area. What I am going to do is put up base
stations in specific areas where I know there is a significant population who
will use my service.
Similarly,
when you are building a fibre network you typically focus on the central
business districts, install your fibre in the ground and wait for customer to
come and request a connection. It is capital intensive, costs a lot of money
and most of the costs come from the civil side of it; digging up the street,
installing ducts, manholes, fibre cabinets, among others. I would say perhaps
70 per cent of your cost comes down to civil infrastructure and the rest of it
is in electronics, the fibre and so on.
Still
on Internet access, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) will soon
license Infrastructure Companies (InfraCoS), what is the level of MainOne
involvement?
For
InfraCoS, NCC has requested operators to come up with detailed technical
solution on broadband deployment and we have decided to bid for the Lagos
region. There are a number of initiatives that we started long before this
InfraCoS thing came about, that justify our commitment here. We have about
300km of fibre already laid, so it makes sense for us to say what else can we
do to become an InfraCo. Also of note is the Yaba i-HQ pilot project because we
worked with the Lagos state government to connect institutions, schools,
businesses, in and around the Yaba area. I think it's a function of making sure
that you have the right solution provider because you don't want a situation
whereby you give InfraCo status to somebody and they cannot utilize the license
and roll out the network or provide quality service. We have done this for
years and so it's not something new to us.
Can you
shed more light on the ICT entrepreneurship support programme in Yaba you
talked about earlier?
Yaba is
something we are trying to build on. In fact one of the things we are doing is
work with entrepreneurial technology companies and specifically the Co-creation
Hub in Yaba. They work with start-up businesses and offer assistance where
necessary to grow their businesses. We have been with them since inception and
given them free Internet support.
We also
sponsor competitions like the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria
(ISPON) competition, Microsoft Imagine Cup among others. The aim is really to
see how we can get small companies working on ICT projects to develop and
deploy their ideas as businesses. How do you do a business case?, how do you
push your product from a piece of paper to something that actually works?; you
need people to give you advice and that's where these hubs are very useful
because they can assist these entrepreneurs.
Why is
MainOne investing in a Tier III Data Centre in Lagos?
We
don't want to be able to box ourselves in just for Internet services. Our plan
is to be able to offer different services to our customers. One of these Data
Centre Services is collocation and that is why we are building this facility to
meet the Tier III data centre standard. We are talking about really good power,
cooling, high security systems etc so that the customer is 100 per cent
confident when they put their servers in our data centre, it will function as
expected. We are looking at November to wrap up the build and start the
commissioning process, once that is done, we will be in a position to let
people bring in their equipment.
In
addition, we will offer cloud based services such as Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS), Storage as a Service (SaaS) and Disaster Recovery (DR).
Looking
at the Data Centre project, how safe will customers' data be?
We have
implemented both physical and electronic access controls to prevent
unauthorized access into the Data centre. Customers must have prior approval
based on access lists. We have biometric security to access the Data Centre
space where the racks are located. For the banking customers who want to have a
higher grade of security, we have caged services, to provide additional
biometric access into the cage environment. In terms of the networking, we
intend to be certified by PCIDSS, and then ISO 27001 standard, to ensure people
have confidence in the network and the security of their data that is stored on
our servers.
With
Africa's investment profile on the increase, is MainOne eyeing investments in
other African countries, especially in building cross border networks, among
others?
Yes. We
already have connectivity in quite a number of West African countries, Ghana is
a major location for us because the submarine cable actually connects to Accra,
but from Accra we have connectivity into Republic of Benin, Togo, Burkina Faso.
The West African countries are our focus. In order to connect, we have to talk
and work with the telecoms operators in those countries and sometimes we find
that it is a bit of a challenge because the SLA in the country might be less
than what we expect. We are going to expand more into other Africa countries.
We do
have a connectivity agreement in East Africa via Seacom, the biggest wholesale
operator there. Our agreement with SEACOM enables us to offer connections to
many of those countries on the East Coast.
How did
Kenya, others get theirs right because Nigeria started the race with them?
Kenya
was a lot more focused in terms of getting the government, local/state, to
fast-track broadband rollout in the country.
You
talked about the financial constraints of deploying services across the
country; do you think VSAT can come into play here, especially in landlocked
areas?
I think
VSAT has its place particularly in rural areas. The major issues are how to get
cheap VSAT terminals and low cost satellite transponder bandwidth to provide a
low cost service. Typically spectrum in terms of megahertz on the international
satellites is still quite expensive, so the only way of getting around that is
to try and get NigComSat to utilize the transponders better and lower costs.
The problem is how much it's going to cost to deploy for rural areas. Its
possible if you have cheap satellite bandwidth coupled with a low-cost terminal
and you distribute with respect to WIFI in a particular area. You also have to
look at how much you would charge each customer; you have to ensure a billing
system is in place as well but it's quite feasible to use VSAT.
What
happened to WIMAX technology?
WIMAX is still alive and kicking; there are
companies that are still running with it in Nigeria. However, the issue with
WIMAX is not that the technology is bad, it's the fact that the license that
has been given is not enough to deliver high speed services as compared to LTE.
For example, the LTE guys are running 20/30/40 megahertz in terms of spectrum
and you can compare this to WIMAX operators who have chunks of 5 megahertz.
Then there is also the issue of efficiency; the LTE technology is more
efficient in terms of bandwidth per MegaHertz. So that's why you actually get
more throughputs out of it. WIMAX been overtaken by the LTE technology. The
advanced LTE technology is similar to 5G and it is the next step in the evolution
of wireless technology.
