Poor performance: NCC to roll out inclusive regulatory initiatives for licensees

The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, has said it will roll out forward-looking and all-inclusive regulatory initiatives to provide market opportunities for all telecommunication licensees, having noticed that a lot of them are not doing well.

The commission made the promise in Lagos at a forum to interact with the licensees; tagged, “Talk to the Regulator” Forum.

Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta, said on the first day of the two day programme that the commission was well aware that not all its licensees were doing as well as they should.

Danbatta said, “Several licensees are struggling to pay their staff, many are unable to comply with basic license obligations and several are defaulting in the payment of their Annual Operating Levies, AOL, and the level of interconnect and other inter-licensee indebtedness is still unacceptably high.

Also speaking, the Executive Commissioner, Stakeholder Management of the NCC, Mr. Adeleke Adewolu said the NCC is currently leading the industry to facilitate the roll out of Broadband Infrastructure so that Nigeria can achieve the target of 70 per cent broadband penetration to at least 90 per cent of the population by 2025 as articulated in the Nigerian National Broadband Plan.

He said, “We are also working to reach broadband speeds of 15Mbp and 25Mbps in rural and urban areas respectively.

“Furthermore, we recently held a stakeholder engagement to formally commence efforts towards the launch of 5G networks in 2022.

This would enable Nigerians to enjoy cutting edge technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, Virtual/Augmented Reality”.