The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) said it would auction the 70-80 Gigahertz (GHz) spectrum band in the second quarter of this year to address the growing demand by operators for data-centric, high speed and high capacity networks that consumers were demanding to meet their bandwidth needs.
The NCC held a consultative forum with industry stakeholders, service providers, investors, financiers, value added services (VAS) providers, and experts yesterday in Lagos, to chart the way forward for the licensing of service providers in this band. The 70/80 GHz band popularly called E-Band is known for high capacity point-to-point communications was yet to be fully explored and exploited in Nigeria.
While informing that the commission had settled for a Light Licensing Model, Nwalune explained that this was an operator- specific frequency licence that the regulator may or may not be responsible for planning, coordination and protection, but must provide low pricing mechanism and data base for registration of users. NCC is adopting a Light Licensing Model for Nigeria that would cost each licensee N14, 400 ($72) per hop per annum in Nigeria.
Executive vice chairman of NCC, Dr. Eugene Juwah, who was represented at the forum by Alhaji Mustapha Bintube, an executive commissioner at NCC said it provides a cost effective alternative for high-speed network backhaul applications according to the NCC. He said beyond the usage and applications,were how to share resources for the common good of the investor community, the service provider community and the consumer of services community.
