By Juliet Umeh
For Nigerians travelling abroad, staying connected without paying high roaming charges can be challenging. NATCOM Development and Investment Limited, trading as NTEL, is betting on WakaGo, its global eSIM service, to provide a more convenient and affordable alternative.
In this interview with Vanguard, NTEL’s Chief Technology Officer, Kingsley Uwazie, explained how WakaGo enables travellers to access mobile data across supported countries without changing their primary SIM cards.
Excerpts.
What are your immediate priorities as NTEL’s Chief Technology Officer?
At NTEL, our aim is to launch a national sovereign network.
Prior, NTEL was NITEL. Before NTEL got privatised, before there was a privatisation, that privatisation has gone through various cycles, like what I would call a teething baby, and has led us here to where we are now. And our aim is to get our SIM cards, get Nigerians connected again, both locally and globally. And it’s a long road back. In trying to achieve that, we have deployed a few products on our road back. Of course, the target is to have the mobile network up and running so that Nigerians can stay connected with us. But at the moment, we have released two products, one being an AirFibre B2B product, and number two being WakaGo, a global eSIM product for Nigerians outside Nigeria.
How do you plan to assess NITEL’s existing network and infrastructure before deciding where investment and upgrades are most urgently needed?
At NTEL, we are pursuing a new growth strategy called BET, which stands for Beam, Eden and Titan. The strategy is built on using our existing assets to generate revenue internally and reinvest it in rebuilding the network, rather than depending entirely on external funding.
Titan focuses on our telecommunications infrastructure, including towers, fibre-optic cables, ducts and rights of way. We are restoring our towers to operation and making them available to other telecom operators through infrastructure sharing. We are also leasing some of our fibre and connectivity assets to generate revenue.
Eden focuses on our real estate. We are entering into strategic partnerships and joint ventures to develop our properties for productive uses, including projects that can benefit communities and serve as technology hubs. Beam is our digital business, which combines connectivity with digital services. Beyond voice and data, we are exploring financial services, banking-related solutions and other digital offerings. WakaGo, our global eSIM service, and AirFibre, our wireless broadband service, fall under this division. In summary, BET is our strategy for maximising the value of NTEL’s existing assets, creating new revenue streams and using the proceeds to rebuild our network and expand our services.
NTEL is developing AirFibre. What technology will underpin the service, which areas will it target first, and how will its performance compare with fibre and mobile broadband?
So, you first of all have to look at what’s the problem we’re trying to solve, let’s start with that. And the problem we’re trying to solve is reliable connectivity. In Nigeria today, you have a lot of fibre cuts and I think a lot of people before me have spoken about the amount of fibre cuts we experience in Nigeria. What we experience in Nigeria in a month is more than what some countries experience in a year. And we have also seen that one of the biggest challenges we have is last mile connection in Nigeria. There is sufficient fibre to the tower, but then last mile, fibre to the home, fibre to the office, you have problems there.
Now, we believe with wireless broadband, with sufficient wireless broadband that can provide fibre-like speeds, we can bridge that gap and that’s where Airfiber comes in. So, Airfiber is a B2B product for us first of all.
We have created what I like to call an open-access wireless metro network. And why did I say it’s an open-access wireless metro network? It’s a next-generation fixed wireless access technology that can do speeds of up to 1.2 gigabits per second. And it’s open-access because we have developed it and we enable the ISPs to ride on our networks to provide last mile connectivity. We understand that the terrain in Nigeria is very difficult terrain. And because it’s difficult, the ISPs struggle with high capital expenditure to deploy fibre and high operating expenditure because of the cost of diesel, the fibre cuts. Now, if we can take that cost, build on our towers and our existing infrastructure, we will provide a network for ISPs to ride on. And then the ISPs will use our metro network to reach the last mile. So, that’s where the Airfiber comes in.
Of course, Airfiber will also be targeted at a few enterprises, but our primary customer is the ISP today. Now, you ask the question, how is that different from fibre? Fibre is wired, Airfiber here is wireless, so it’s operating on spectrum.
And we have successful cases of deploying Airfiber over a 9-kilometre distance today. A wireless 9-kilometre distance, just to give you context of that. If I were to build fibre in a place like Abuja today, a kilometre of fibre will cost me somewhere between N3 million to N4 million to dig right of way and all that. So, if I were to build a 9-kilometre fibre, the best scenario is worth N27 million. With an Airfiber link, I would be able to do that wirelessly and drop a reasonable capacity there, over 300 Mbps, 400 Mbps. These are speeds that normally were not possible on wireless before now.
What coverage, speed, pricing and customer growth targets will you use to measure AirFibre’s success?
I’ll go back to one of the questions you asked, because you asked, how do we intend to deploy Airfiber? Today, Airfiber exists in Lagos and Abuja, but this is what we call our trial phase. The aim is to take the connectivity to areas that lack fibre, is to take this connectivity to Ibadan, to take this connectivity to Abia State, to take this connectivity to Benin. Our second phase would add six cities, six other cities across the geopolitical zones, and then we would go into 12 cities. We aim to have connectivity everywhere using Airfiber. In terms of speeds, I have just mentioned, Airfiber can do distances of up to 13 kilometres. But for what we have practically deployed today, we have a link that is above 9 kilometres. We’ve not had a need for a practical link of 13, so I won’t tell you about 13. Again, Airfiber can do speeds of up to 1.2 gig per link, 1.2 Gbps per link. However, a pop of Airfiber is carrying over a capacity of over 12 Gbps. So from a pop, we can distribute over 12 Gbps across to the community.
Tell us about WakaGo Global eSIM and how it works for Nigerian travellers?
WakaGo is a global eSIM service designed to help Nigerians travelling abroad stay connected without having to buy a local SIM card at their destination or remove their existing SIM card.
Once activated on a compatible phone, WakaGo provides data for internet access, WhatsApp calls and messaging across different countries. Travellers can keep their primary SIM active to receive regular calls while using WakaGo for data, helping them avoid expensive roaming charges when making calls over their regular network.
The service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, allowing users to pay for what they use without being locked into a particular country or fixed bundle. WakaGo allows Nigerians to stay connected to their loved ones locally. And the rates are very fair, when you compare WakaGo to our competitors out there. So when I say fair, I mean fair against roaming charges, better than the existing roaming charges.
So what role will national roaming and infrastructure sharing play in expanding NTEL’s reach?
First of all, I would like to say, national roaming and infrastructure sharing are instruments that have been developed by the NCC, and we have to give a lot of credit to the NCC for being very, very proactive and progressive in this. In Africa, the approach of one network building out is not possible. You can’t have one network have the entire coverage, so you need things like national roaming. You need things like infrastructure sharing. You need what we call neutral host networks in order for us to have coverage everywhere. And these are instruments that NTEL intends to leverage on. In our rollout of our local mobile network, we would be utilising national roaming, whereby areas we don’t have our sites, we would roam on existing operators. And we would use infrastructure sharing in both passive and active areas also to provide service. We also have our sites and spectrum. So where we deem fit business-wise, we would have our sites. So it’s going to be a combination of all these instruments for us to provide coverage nationwide.
How will satellite services complement the company’s terrestrial network, particularly in underserved and remote communities?
At NTEL, we believe that no single technology can solve Nigeria’s connectivity challenges. Instead, we plan to combine different technologies to ensure more people, especially those in rural and underserved communities, have access to reliable internet services.
Unlike developed countries, where fibre infrastructure was established before mobile networks, Nigeria relies heavily on mobile networks, putting pressure on them. To address this, we need a combination of technologies. Fibre will provide long-distance connectivity, mobile networks will serve consumers, AirFibre will connect users in areas where laying fibre may be difficult, while satellite services will provide broadband access to rural communities and support private industrial networks. By combining mobile, fibre, AirFibre and satellite services, NTEL hopes to bridge connectivity gaps and improve internet access across Nigeria.
Given the high cost of networking infrastructure and Nigeria’s current economic conditions, how will NTEL balance investment in new technology with affordable services for consumers?
We are local at NTEL and that’s where I would take it from. I would take it from our Titan business, which is our tower business. We are leveraging the strategic assets we have to provide towers and infrastructure in areas that some of the top companies today cannot. I don’t want to put a figure, but at lower costs than what our competition in the infrastructure business can provide, because of our relationships, because we’re partly government owned, and because we’re a sovereign carrier by heart, we might look private, but we’re still a sovereign carrier by heart.
So, what is NTEL’s strategy for improving network resilience amid power supply constraints, fibre cuts, vandalism, and other infrastructural challenges.
For network resilience, there’s no hard and fast rules. I’m not going to say anything that the others are not doing but for resilience, you just have to build reliability into your network deployment and have a reliable transmission, reliability in every part of the solution design, that’s one. Then, for power, and you could see the reliability not just in our transmission, but also in power. So I’ll give an example, today, at the site we have diesel generators, CNG, solar, and have a grid. So, you have reliability across, and then you still have your batteries, your lithium batteries. So, we have reliability across to ensure that downtime, we’re providing 99.999% availability. In transmission, we’re also ensuring that on all of our sites, we have our backup, what we call a reliable link, and we have what we call a restoration link.
So what specific milestone should customers, investors, and regulators use to judge whether NTEL’s technology transformation is succeeding?
So the theme for WakaGo, for example, is WakaGo, WakaCome, stay connected. Our aim is to keep Nigerians connected, whether you’re abroad or you’re local.
That’s one. And we want to do it on a very reliable network, we want to build reliability. We want to be trusted, we want Nigerians to trust us, we don’t want you to say, oh, Nitel. And we’re building it brick by brick. Today, we have gotten a lot of customer commendations from WakaGo. We have people that have used WakaGo in Japan seamlessly, travelled, gone for studies, and come back.
We have someone that had to cover the World Cup finals who used WakaGo. While everyone couldn’t connect, he was able to do a video call to test WakaGo out in New York in a packed stadium and we have testimonies like this. Recently, we had a group of businessmen travel to China, over five of them. One had WakaGo, and the others had to ask him to hotspots because they found it more convenient, they found the connection more reliable. And at the end of the trip, everyone was a WakaGo customer. So our milestone, our success matrix, would be based on the consumer. The consumer’s satisfaction, the consumer’s happiness with our service, the consumer’s trust in NTEL again, is our success matrix.
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