Nigeria’s, Africa’s most populous nation of more than 160 million people, wants to reach a 30 percent broadband penetration by 2017, Information and Communication Technology Minister Omobola Johnson said.
“We are working towards our target for data penetration, that’s broadband,” Johnson said in an interview with Bloomberg Africa TV to be broadcast on Dec. 21. “We’ve hit the target in terms of penetration of voice services, so we’re probably about 70 to 80 percent.”
Nigeria saw its bandwidth increase about 26-fold to more than 9,000 gigabytes per second in the past four years, according to data provided by the Communications Ministry. A lot of that remains stranded in the cities where the nodes landed due to a lack of infrastructure to distribute it.
Nigeria is Africa’s biggest mobile-phone market with 118.5 million subscribers as of September 2013, according to the Nigerian Communications Commission. Phone companies, including market leader MTN Group Ltd. (MTN), are looking to data to help drive slowing revenue growth from voice.
Bloomberg
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