IPNX Nigeria Limited, a wireless broadband company, is currently deploying Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network connectivity in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt.
The FTTH network roll-out, which it commenced in 2012 was targeted at covering 100, 000 households in Lagos by 2014, 500,000 households across the country by 2015 and 2 million households nationwide by 2017.
Announcing the new plan for the deployment of fibre to the home in Lagos recently, Group Executive Director, IPNX, Mr. Ifeanyi Amah, said the services from the FTTH network would be launched under the brand name Fibre optic Services (FoS), which is currently available in selected areas of Lagos Island, Victoria Island, Ikoyi and Lekki.
The service, Amah said would be commercially offered to an initial 50,000 households and businesses within these areas as well as customers in Ikeja, Apapa and Surulere from November 2013.
The IPNX FoS is a 'quad play' broadband FTTH service that will offer customers combination of high speed internet, fixed telephony service, Internet Protocol (IP) Television and Video Surveillance all bundled over the fibre optic network platform. This service was designed to propel Nigeria into the select league of countries that can boast of having the true next generation broadband network, being the first kind of multiple service offerings over a fibre optic network platform in Nigeria.
Fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) refers to a form of fibre optic cable technology that extends fibre optic cables from the network operator's central office to a subscriber's residence or business. Once in the subscriber's home, the signal can be conveyed in any number of ways including wireless (Wi-Fi) or twisted pair to simultaneously reach various IP-enabled devices.
Speaking on the speed of connectivity, Amah said: "With guaranteed speeds starting from 4 Megabits per second (4Mbps), FoS allows users to access the internet at speeds at least 10 times faster than 3G, WiMAX-4G or DSL while also making it possible to carry out multimedia communications such as cable television, video conferencing and video surveillance at the same time."
With its bundle of multiple services that are connected to different divides in the home through the IP-enabled devices, the service allows different people in a family to watch different television channels and different offerings from their connected devices, without interrupting each other.
According to Amah, "These are surely good signs for the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry in Nigeria especially for the Ministry of Communications Technology and the Nigerian Communications Commission that have been in the fore front driving the growth of broadband penetration in Nigeria that is currently estimated at less than 5 per cent." Industry analysts have attributed part of this low penetration to the paucity of local access infrastructure, commonly referred to as last mile, which is the gap that IPNX FTTH roll-out is set out to close.
The IPNX FTTH initiative not only aligns with the recently approved Nigeria's National Broadband plan, which targets FTTH deployments in major Nigerian cities but also exceeds the country's policy target of providing 2.4Mbps bandwidth speed to Nigerian consumers by the end of 2013.
According to Amah, the initial services plans for the Internet service would start at 4Mbps to 12Mbps for all residential, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), customers, while services to corporate customers would have no speed limit.
He explained that as the cost of international bandwidth drops further in the next few years, the company would be able to offer more speed at reduced price.
The plan is to offer up to 20Mbps by the end of 2014, and 50Mbps in 2016, Amah said.
Source: http://www.hispanicbusiness.com/2013/10/3/ipnx_targets_two_million_homes_for.htm
