Experts in the Information and Communications Technology industry in Nigeria have frowned at poor connectivity services been delivered at public organisations resulting in loss of working hours and poor service delivery.
A network connectivity expert, Dewole Ajao, said: “Day after day, many Nigerians stand in line for hours at banks, airline ticketing offi ces, government service providers like Customs, driver’s license authority, among others waiting for networkdowntime. Th e usual culprit is that “the network is slow” or “the server is not going”. As a network engineer, I cringe each time I hear “the network” being blamed for portal design or capacity planning failure.”
He however urged the relevant regulatory institutions in the information and communications technology to intervene with guidelines to address this anomaly.
“NITDA, NCC and Federal Ministry of Communications Technology, are now overdue to issue guidelines especially where public services are involved, before networked software or portal is deployed for public use, the application developers should be required to demonstrate how many kilobits/second (kbps) of bandwidth is required per concurrent user.
Th is will help the organization budget appropriately for network connectivity to give end users a hitch-free experience. Network operators supporting such portals must also be mandated to provide network and server utilization statistics on a weekly/monthly basis to help with assessment of resource utilization,” he stated.
According to Nigeria Communications Week, the former managing director, Direct on PC, (now Direct On Data) Anurag Garg, attributed part of the challenge to access, he argued that a typical 3G base station can only deliver 7.2 Mbps and that telcos congest the few available 3G base stations with lots of subscribers which reduces the speed of the internet delivered to them.
He hoped that the situation will change as telcos upgrade to 4G which delivers up to 25Mbps per base station which give more access to data subscribers.
