The West Africa Telecommunications Regulators Assembly (WATRA) has set aside some cogent initiatives to facilitate infrastructure sharing among West African countries to reduce internet costs for telecom subscribers.
The Executive Secretary of the telecom regulation body, Aliyu Aboki, announced this development during a meeting with stakeholders. According to him, infrastructure such as gateways, and data centres are facilities that could be shared by countries in the region.
Admitting that the cost of internet across West African countries is still high, Aboki said a lower cost of internet access would enhance the digital economy for the respective countries in the region and increase the consumption of data by the citizens, which in turn generate more revenue for the telecom operators.
Aboki stated: “For example, we have infrastructures like gateways, data centre servers, and so on. These are infrastructures that can be shared and used by different countries without necessarily having everyone building the same infrastructure.”
“So, we are collectively looking at these rich regional initiatives that enable us to share infrastructure to bring down the cost of Internet ultimately,” he added
Identifying lack of interconnectivity as another factor driving up the cost of telecom services in the sub-region, Aboki lamented that currently, for content hosted in one African country to be accessed in another African country, it has to first go through Europe.
The WATRA scribe said this is happening because data centres in the region are not connected directly, a factor that is making internet access costlier for the users. While noting that one of the critical programs of the body is to encourage the interconnectivity of the respective countries.
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Aboki said: “We have data centres springing up in different countries, but to interconnect to these data centres, we need to go through submarine cables to Europe and the Western countries and back to Africa, just to interconnect. This creates additional cost.”
“Now, once we can interconnect within our regions across boundaries, we will certainly drive down costs. In addition to that, he said the organization is also working with countries and national regulators in respective West African countries to improve their universal service policies to boost rural connectivity.” Aboki ended.
