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The board of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has approved two additional Infrastructure Company (Infraco) Licences as part of efforts to deepen broadband penetration in the country.
Tony Ojobo, Director Public Affairs of the NCC disclosed this in a statement issued on Wednesday. He said the two new licencees are Zinox Technology Limited for South East and Brinks Integrated Solutions Limited for North East. This brings the number of approved infraco licences to four.
According to the statement, “over a year ago, MainOne Cable Company Limited, had been licenced to provide services in Lagos while IHS got its licence to cover the North Central geopolitical zone including Abuja”.
It said there were three more licences will be approved for Sputh South, North West and South West, to bring the total approved licences to seven.
“The Infraco licences are based on the NCC’s Open Access Model (OAM) in line with the National Broadband Plan (NBP) of (2013 – 2018)”, it added.
Ojobo said that by provisions of the National Broadband Plan (NBP), Nigeria is expexted to attain 30 percent broadband penetration by 2018.
He explained that “as part of the initiative to achieve this, NCC, as the driver of this process, has so far licenced a number of companies to stimulate broadband penetration. These include Bitflux Communications Limited (Bitflux) for 2.3 Ghz and MTN Nigeria for the 2.6 Ghz licences. Other licences are in the pipeline in this process. As at December, 2017, Nigeria had attained 22% broadband penetration”.