The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) says an auctioned 2.3 gigahertz (ghz) spectrum band licence will set the stage for broadband internet revolution in Nigeria
After auctioning the licence on Tuesday, the Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Mr Eugene Juwah, said the 2.3 ghz spectrum band was designated for commercial use on a national basis.
Bitflux Communications Limited won the deal, beating national mobile carrier, Globacom with a bid of 23.25 million dollars.
Mr Juwah urged the new licensee to ensure that Nigerians would feel the impact of this new revolution as soon as possible.
Bitflux has 14 working days to pay-up the cost of the bid as well as 155 million Naira for wholesale wireless access service licence.
Transparent And Revolutionary
At about 11:00am, the auctioning, supervised by the Ministry of Information Technology and the communications commission’s boss, began rather slowly at the venue of the auction for the 2.3 ghz spectrum broadband in Abuja.
Globacom’s 23.05 million dollars was bid not enough to seal the deal for the telecom giant in an auction key players in the industry said was both transparent and revolutionary.
The successful bid by Bitflux brings in the much needed variety and competition to broadband in Nigeria and the new licence, when operational, will provide retail service providers and other users with the requisite wholesale wireless access and bandwidth to provide service to their subscribers in line with the National Broadband Plan of 2013.
The management of Bitflux expressed optimism that the deal would give Nigerians a better internet services and would also improve broadband penetration which is currently low.