The Minister of Communi
cations Technology, Mrs Omobola Johnson, says the Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) built across the country were meant to foster an enabling technological environment for socio-economic development.
Johnson told The Tide source in an interview yesterday in Abuja that the project was executed with subsidies provided by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF).
“The Federal Government of Nigeria established the USPF to facilitate extension of telecommunications services to underserved and unserved communities.
“The law establishing the USPF which is the Nigerian Communications Act (NCA) of 2003, empowers it to promote widespread availability and usage of network services throughout Nigeria.
“It does this by encouraging the installation of network facilities and the provision of network services to institutions and to unserved and underserved areas and groups in Nigeria,’’ Johnson said.
She also disclosed that the USPF was initiating various programmes and projects to facilitate the deployment of ICT infrastructure and services.
The minister said this was designed to extend ICT and other telecommunication services to people living in rural areas where operators were unlikely to provide services.
“One of the programmes designed by the USPF to extend telecommunications services is Accelerated Mobile Phone Expansion (AMPE) programme which ensures the extension of mobile telephony services to unserved and underserved communities.
“The AMPE Programme is implemented in collaboration with Network Operators.
“BTS is one project under the AMPE which the USPF provides subsidies to operators to extend telecommunications services to unserved communities,’’ Johnson said.
Johnson disclosed that the Federal Government, as part of the transformation agenda, would not lose focus on an estimated 40 million Nigerians that still lacked access to ICT services.
She said that in order to address the ICT needs of the rural populace, the USPF had based on a Geographical Information System (GIS) study, created ICT Gap Clusters of areas that were unserved or underserved.
She said each cluster had population estimates, size, major towns, main economic activities/occupation, institutions and vegetation type that would assist USPF in designing projects to addressed peculiar ICT needs of each community.
“ In addition, Operators/Implementers would utilise the information in creating the appropriate service-mix for each cluster.
“The ICT Gap clusters is an innovative way of ensuring that all communities benefit from the immense opportunities that ICT brings and are able to effectively participate in the new digital economy.
“Through the utilisation of the ICT Gap Cluster model, the USPF plans to ensure that universal coverage is achieved in the next two to three years,’’ Johnson said.
According to her, the latest of the BTS commissioned was in Ondo State which was to serve 111 communities with an estimated population of 664,500 citizens who were now connected to telephone services.
The minister also said that in the next implementation phase, the USPF planned to support the deployment of more than 200 BTS across the country.