Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria will need at least seventy thousand to eighty thousand telecommunication base stations to actualize the dream of joining the club of countries working toward making Internet of Things (IoT) a reality by leveraging 4G and 5G networks, a top official at the Nigerian Communications Commission has said.
Basically, with the current advancement of Io, is it is expected to offer advanced connectivity of devices, systems, and services that goes beyond machine-to-machine(M2M) communications and covers a variety of protocols, domains, and applications.
However, Nigeria is yet to tap into the variety of opportunities provided by the IoT concepts.
According to the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof Umar Garba Danbatta, Nigeria currently has less than 50,000 base stations which is way back from the figures needed.
Prof Danbatta, made this known at a sitting of the House of Representatives’ Ad Hoc Committee investigating the health implications of mounting telecommunications masts close to building, yesterday in Abuja.
He said: “3G, 4G going to 5G networks are going to usher this country into smart applications, the Internet of Things or the smart world and cities we are talking about.
“And of course because of the additional burden on infrastructure, the present capacity of telecom infrastructure is grossly inadequate to cater for these additional platforms or services we talk about.
“Therefore we will need from 70,000 to 80,000 base transceiver masts to be able to provide the effective capacity that is needed to deploy 4G going to 5G,” Danbatta said while responding to questions from members of the ad hoc committee.
The NCC boss called on the improvements of agencies at all levels of government in the country to synergize with NCC with a view to achieving the target, noting that the United Kingdom (UK), with a population of almost one third of Nigeria already has close to 60,000 masts.
