FG will increase broadband penetration from 45 to 90% – Minister

The Federal Government plans to increase broadband penetration to most parts of the country to 90 per cent from its current 45 per cent, Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, has said.

Pantami said this in a briefing organised by the All Progressives Congress (APC) professional forum in Abuja on Thursday.

Broadband penetration refers to the number of subscriptions to fixed and mobile broadband services.

The minister stressed that the Muhammadu Buhari-led government has recorded a 45 percent increase in broadband penetration from the 30 percent rate achieved from 2000, with a 10 per cent increase within a year, from the period of September 2019 to November 2020.

He said that the “unprecedented” success in the area of broadband penetration was due to the enabling policies established by the federal government in its commitment to digitalise Nigeria.

Pantami noted that a digital economy is an enabler of all sectors and its importance cannot be underscored, as only digital economies will be relevant in global affairs in the near future.

“On assumption of office, we had a statistic of 50 million Nigerians with no access to telecommunication facilities. We developed the National Broadband Plan 2020-2030 which targets a 90 percent penetration rate in terms of population and a 70 percent rate in terms of our total land mass within the next two years,” he said.

“It also targets a speed of 25mbps for urban areas while a 10mbps speed is targeted for rural areas. So far, we have been able to achieve a 10 per cent increase just within a year which brings the success rate to 45 percent.

“Broadband is the backbone of a digital economy as it has been identified by global experts that a 10% increase in Broadband penetration will increase the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of an economy by 1.6 to 1.8 percent.”

Pantami further said that the digital economy sector remains the fastest growing sector with the highest contribution to Nigeria’s GDP in the present administration.

The Nigerian national broadband plan 2020-2025 signed by Buhari in March 2020 shows that “the new Broadband Plan is designed to deliver data download speeds across Nigeria with effective coverage available to at least 90% of the population by 2025 at a price not more than N390 per 1GB of data.”