What would you need to create broadband internet access?

I am curious. a friend is thinking along the line of using the NITEL infrastructure to provide broadband Internet access. I always thought the problem was connection speed between the individual customers and the provider in Nigeria but it seems there is a problem with queuing at the satellite. Is there an alternative to using satellites and if there is what are they?

The main problem is the lack of communication infrastructure in place, the real problem is that it has to go to the sattalite in the first place if you look at how high speed internet is offered in other countries you will see that satallite is very rarely used due to the latency it incours.

I don't know if nigeria peers into any communication links to Europe etc but the emerging wimax technology could be something to look into if high speed links are available.

Also if your interested I'll briefly explain how broadband in australia works, we have our local telephone exchanges (land line) which house a thing called a DSLAM which provides ADSL(broadband) to people within a certain range (about 7km max) from the local exchange it travels via fibre (very very very expensive to lay and purchase equipment) and then goes to a larger exchange and then finally ends up in the whole state exchange and then depending on where it needs to go it either goes locally out or via underwater cable to the US or Asia.
As you can see it's quite a complicated setup/practice so it's unsurprising that it isn't available in a few countries, but there is hope, Africa is close to europe so theoritically a high speed link could be installed to link the two without the use of a satallite (a nearly dead internet technology here)


Anyways I hope I kind of explained whats missing etc infrastructure wise etc and question just post away and I'll try to answer my best (I know a fair bit about networking concepts and the such)

Anyways Good Luck


ps. I'm off to bed now it's nearly 1am :S

NITEL has just launched its IP warehouse in Lagos and would provide bandwidth to local Internet Service Providers at cheaper rates. The speed will also be higher than before since the IP exchange is connected directly to London via optic fibre cable which is more reliable than VSAT.

We hope this service would be taken advantage of by our ISPs to provide internet services at lower rates. One thing that is sure is that the use of VSAT would gradually fade away from the market.

That's right! The official name of the service is 'IP Wholesale' and you can read about it on Thisday Online:

"The IP Wholesale service provides bandwidth to the worldwide internet using the NITEL IP Gateway in Lagos. The Gateway is connected via the SAT-3 cable to the worldwide internet and will provide access to a broad range of clientele who are increasingly deploying as the platform for their businesses in the networked global information economy."
http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=15076
(login with username nairaland, password nairaland)

The home page of the SAT 3 cable system is: http://www.safe-sat3.co.za/

To give you an idea of what's in place here, have a look at

http://www.agile.com.au/pdf/agile-network-map-mar05.pdf
(There a third party providor not out main one)

http://telstraglobal.com/flash_map/
(external links on our main tier 1 providor)

http://info.connect.com.au/docs/network/netmap.html
(another third party providor)

Telstra is our main providor however they don't reveal there complete network however it's not unreasonable to say get up to 1.2mb (yes megabytes) a second on the cable network (all for a tasty $60 Australian Dollars a month (about $50 american)) and ADSL at a somewhat slower speed (some providors are just rolling out services that will allow people to get speeds up to about 2.5mb a second (though finding a server on the internet that can upload that fast is problably harder))

But what I am trying to say is unless there is competition what's going to make them make it a cheap product, for instance If i was the only person in the world that sold hamburgers i could say charge $1000 a burger because there is no-one else that sells or makes them so there is no competition I have to beat by lowering my prices.

Also i have yet to find a NITEL website, does one exist?

Hunter, you're right. But Globacom Limited is reported to building its own fiber optic link to the UK, which should provide the necessary competition. NITEL's IP Broadband service is still in competition with VSAT providers, so at least it [I]will be cheap[u]er[/u][/I] than what we have now.

Though the bandwidth cost may not be much less VSAT for now, the network latency would be much lower. So Internet browsing should be much faster in networks that use this service. (There's a limit to how fast you can browse on a VSAT network regardless of bandwidth at your disposal).

I don't think we're missing much by not being able to stream video in real-time. A lot of essential business activities only require web access, which we have now.

Once you have broadband you cannot go back, I find dial-up unbearably slow now having used it from 1993->1999 (various speeds obviously) video streaming is not the only thing broadband is used for (infact it's not really used at all for that here) but mostly convenience. You find your self just going to "quickly" surf up the session times to movies, grab a mp3 etc.

Believe me once you get it you can't go back

Also I think that if a carrier was going to start rolling out broadband via wireless (802.11) Voice over ip potentially has a massive market in nigeria.

Well NITEL has got something new on the block. They now have their own fibre optics. I do hope it works; they've been touting it as the best thing that will happen to Internet access in Nigeria. It is meant to be cheaper and more easily accessible. My prayer, again, is "I hope it works".

The service is IP Wholesale and it has been launched according to the following website:
http://www.nigeriafirst.org/article_3910.shtml

thanks seun for the map and thanks to all of you but seun i thought of something (why not send it across the sahara desert :-D) . ha ha ha

With NITEL in charge, I'm not holding my breath, especially when I remember how badly they ran (and still run) Nigeria's telecommunication infrastructure. I'll wait until either they are fully privatised or Globacom eventually get their own fibre optic network rolled out.

The government that owns NITEL ran it down with their policies. I think we should encourage them rather than castigate them. Remember that its difficult to point accusing fingers where the government is concerned. I know i have read some peoples' comments on the GPRS service provided by Glo on this forum and their intention to migrate back to MTN! So sometimes the devil you know is better!!

bla bla bla (jst felt like reviving this post)

mujana

You certainly dug deep to revive this post. What can we do to keep it alive for its sake?

Whats the state of the "IP Wharehouse" project?

jst went to the very last page and clicked on the last one
hv no idea about the ip stuff

kodewrita:

thanks seun for the map and thanks to all of you but seun i thought of something (why not send it across the sahara desert :-D) . ha ha ha

why dont you just tell us that is where you live! huh?

@javascript or dhtml or whateva your name is, the people in the village where i am serving will resent that remark. I dont live in the sahara.

I was just curious as to why we had to go round the coast (shortest distance between two points=straight line).