WorldStage Newsonline– Nigeria’s Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr Isa Ali Pantami, has assured that the high price of data in the country will be reduced by 40% by 2025.
Speaking at the opening of a week-long training on Digital Skills in News Reportage for ICT Journalist, organized by the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) in Abuja, the minister linked the challenge of broadband penetration, which is the Right of Way (RoW) and frequent Vanderlization of ICT infrastructure to the high data price.
He said, “The money being spent to RoW, the money being spent in providing security is what makes the price of data and call to go higher, but with the intervention of government now, the price of Right of Way the price of N145, in some state before our intervention 1 lineal meters was N10, 000 some N6,000 but the intervention is now only 145 naira.
“So we need to come together to make the sector more profitable make the environment more conducive for more investment and at the same time encourage the investors to ensure that they use the price of the services they provide.
“And this is very important, with all this intervention we want to ensure that before the end of 2025 our target in price of data should not be more than 40% what we purchase data today. That is why we are ensuring unnecessary costs of spending by operators will no more.
“To promote digital economy, digital skills and many more ensure that your citizen has access to broadband. By the time I came on board on the 21st 2019 broadband penetration was 31% from the inception of broadband in Nigeria and up to 21st august 2019 it was 31% in less than a year broadband is now 41%.
“Without broadband plan our target in our rural area is a minimum of 10gigabit per seconds, in urban cities is up to 25mb per seconds a minimum of that but we are targeting that by 2025, the penetration of broadband we want to achieve a minimum of 70%.
“When it comes to our population of around 200million approximately, our target is 90% should have access to broadband not only internet broadband, which is high speed, if you say 90% by implication we are targeting 180million Nigerians to have access to broadband by 2025. This is part of promoting digital economy.”
