- The poor electricity supply in Nigeria has brought untold hardship to the telecoms industry as telecommunication operators purportedly spend as much as N16 billion yearly on diesel generators that power each Base Transceiver Station (BTS), commonly known as base stations.
- Director, Public Affairs at the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Mr. Tony Ojobo, who confirmed this in a recent radio programme, said:
“Telecommunication operates within an eco-system, where you have other factors affecting it and one of that is power. Right now power is a major cost for telecom operators. Now one of the major operators has about 4000 generators across the nation and this operator has to fuel all of his generators, and one of them as at last year, spent about 4 billion naira on diesel alone.”
- Going by the number of Global Systems for Mobile Communication (GSM) operators in the country, which currently stands at four, and which constitute the major telcos in the country, it then implies that the four major telcos in the country, spend over N16 billion on diesel every year. Industry analysts said the huge amount of money could have been channeled to infrastructure development and network expansion, to ease network congestion and poor telecoms service delivery.
- Source:Thisday
