Not sure what the steps are for the decoder- do you have any specifics (like the manufacturer of the box)? I'm not in Nigeria anymore, and I've never seen a HiTV box, but I'd be happy to help figure it out remotely :-)

HiTV uses transponders on Eutelsat W4. The channel listing for that satellite is here:
http://www.lyngsat.com/ew4.html
You won't be able to get all the channels on that satellite, though- some are encrypted, and others are spot beams (like the ones marked for Russia, etc) that don't put any signal out over Nigeria. The free channels you should be able to get in Nigeria are:

Transponder 2 (marked as owned by TrendTV- are they even still in business?)
-France 24 English
-Nollywood Movies
-Fashion TV Europe
-F-Men
-EWTN Africa & India
-Luxe TV UK

GTV and Multichoice also use that satellite, but their signals are all encrypted.

What's Hitv's technology? Their website mentions that they use satellite and terrestrial broadcasts- are they using MMDS or something similar on the ground, or is it all satellite?

Just curious,

Doh- forgot to mention this in my reply, I heard that AIT was in negotiations with EchoStar (Dish NetworK) to be carried there. Echostar has been aggressive in adding to their international lineup, and has snagged several other channels from Globecast, so it's possible that AIT could pop back up at Dish soon.

AIT doesn't appear to be carried by Globecast anymore. The channel is no longer in their lineup. As for RayPower, I've had GlobeCast for more than a year, and they never carried Raypower- their call center said that DAAR stopped feeding it to them.

NTA is still on, tho.

In fact, there are several cities in Nigeria with high resolution images now. Brass, Onitsha, Asaba, Enugu, and a whole stretch of land from Port Harcourt to Aba all have much higher resolution images than Lagos. Nothing for Abuja that I can see. Major cities in other countries also have updated images- Accra, Lome, etc.

That's awesome!

If you want to see even better detail, go to Otta,

If I understand Mweb's offering properly, you're not exactly getting Internet using their dish (the one you get TV from), you're getting a separate VSAT setup. Please correct me if I'm wrong here,

wimaxer: the lack of local peering isn't just an environmental problem. I tried convincing local ISPs that peering was the way to go back in '99, and while many of the technical staff understood what I was talking about, the suits (eg; the people who write the checks) didn't understand it, and didn't trust the other ISPs enough to peer with them. So on the one hand, if the major operators back then (Hyperia, Linkserve, Cyberspace, etc) had started working on peering we'd have an exchange in Lagos, and probably an entire in-country hosting industry that doesn't exist now. But on the other hand, a few years later when someone at the NCC heard talk about an Internet exchange, they told me that the exchange would have to be a company, would have to apply for an ISP license, as well as a special IP exchange license that would have to be created (bureaucracy, bureaucracy, etc).

I'm glad to see people rolling out wimax, though. For those of you who are doing it now, what sort of coverage area distance-wise are you seeing from your transmitter sites?