| Lagos Internet Service Providers
While in Lagos, I took the opportunity to visit three of the most
popular Internet service providers. Gratifyingly, at two ISPs a
member of the staff recognized me for the presentation I gave at last
year’s AfriNet99 conference. This seemed to make it easier to
get a good conversation going.
Motophone-HyperiaThe first visit was to a group called Motophone-Hyperia. Their offices were relatively well appointed, with a half dozen or more Nigerian clerks and secretaries to greet us, but the technical questions and the business considerations were handled by two of the Lebanese management staff, Tony Khoury and Mona Farchaikh. They were able to handle basic questions about dial-up service and some of the wireless and microwave connections they provide to business clients in Lagos. But they referred the larger technological questions as well as the questions about partnership with the universities to their boss, who unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to meet. Not wanting to be too precise about things, I'm sure to protect their company's interests, they were able to tell me that Motophone-Hyperia had about twelve hundred dial-in customers whom they handled with about thirty modems. They claimed to have a direct connection to the Internet that doesn’t go through NITEL, but I was unable to confirm this. I find it suspicious because Motophone-Hyperia is one ISP NITEL publicly endorses. Their satellite bandwidth is currently 256K, but they expect to upgrade it to 512K shortly. They are currently working on a satellite installation in Port Harcourt. Motophone-Hyperia has a couple of dozen business clients in the Lagos
area as well. Some are serviced via a dedicated dial-up and a
handful of others are served via local microwave units at sppeds up
9.6K. They report that the radio traffic around Lagos is wild and
unregulated. As such, they have had varying results with different
technologies. They have managed to send a microwave signal up to
five kilometers and they are just starting to experiment with spread
spectrum technologies. I asked if they thought they'd be able to
service the University of Lagos campus with microwave, and they
seriously doubted that they could get a signal to travel that far in the
Lagos environs. Their company has tried to set up ISPs at other cities, Abuja in
particular, but they mentioned three or four endeavors that have fallen
through so far. Their current focus is to set up an Internet
presence in Port Harcourt. Their server system includes a firewall server and a proxy server
with four gigabytes of cache for Web pages. I proposed the idea of possibly working with the universities to
create additional connectivity, or even partnership, partnering with the
universities to create new access points around the country. The
two managers I spoke with seemed agreeable, but again, said I should
talk to their General Manager and Owner. I tried dialing into Motophone-Hyperia from friend's account and was unable to connect after several tries on a Saturday afternoon. Two long-term customers related serious difficulties getting connections and remarkably slow Web browsing. They use the service for POP email.
CyberspaceMy second visit was to the Cyberspace Limited. There I met with the Managing Director and owner, Sunny A. Imudia, as well as his main assistant.
Cyberspace is the oldest Internet service in Lagos, and it appears to be entirely Nigerian owned. They boast of more than a thousand customers and have fifty dial-in lines feeding into their main office. Prominent in the courtyard of their business' compound is a 3.8 meter send and receive satellite dish, the exact make and model that the NUC wishes to install at universities around Nigeria. Mr. Imudia reported that he had a license to send and receive data
outside of Nigeria for his company's own uses and not to provide such
services to his customers, although I would be the first to doubt the
NCC's ability to detect and discern whether this was actually taking
place. The Managing Director didn't confirm this, but neither did
he deny it.
Mr. Imudia seemed particularly interested in the concept of working
with the Nigerian universities, especially if the partnership meant that
he could create more access points for his services around the country.
I asked him if, should the NUC purchase services and equipment from
another source, he would be willing to contract as a resource person for
the universities to help them maintain their routers and servers, and he
said, "Yes." All in all, I found him very easy to
talk to and much interested in doing innovative and creative things with
the universities. Cyberspace has been working on creating points of presence at other parts of Nigeria. Mr. Imudia talked about trying to set one up in Jos and in Abuja, but he found it difficult to find reliable people to manage them so they eventually closed down. He's still working on it, however, and today his two main targets are Abuja and Port Harcourt. I've held a CyberSpace account, so I'm more than familiar with the common difficulties of establishing a connection and browsing the Web. I did not get a chance to try their new satellite connection... MicrocomThe third ISP I visited was Microcom. There I met with the Assistant Manager, Mr. Mohammadu Aliyu, as the Lebanese manager, Mr. Raghid Kheir, was out of the country at the time. Mr. Aliyu responded to almost all inquiries positively. He seemed eager to please and no doubt would have offered to wire the universities up himself if I had posed the option.
He was good enough to tell me that Microcom has about a little over a
thousand customers with fifty dial-in lines hosted at NITEL and a two
Mbit microwave connection from NITEL's main switches to his
office. Microcom has two Sun Sparc workstations acting as servers,
a UNIX box, and NT server providing various other facilities.
Their server room was neither state of the art, nor was it inadequate
either. Some things were twist tied together, and most things were
plugged in according to spec. (Once again, I am struck at how
ordinary these server rooms look now that the technology has advanced to
this point. Microcom’s server room looks no different than those
of hometown ISPs all over America.) Microcom had a room with about sixteen computers as a Cyber Café for
their customers. Using one of these machines, I logged on to the
Internet and tried to open the Exchange e-mail home page for the
Department of Physiology at the University of Iowa. After five
minutes, I gave up. Instead I went to the home page of my
Internetworks class. The text popped up relatively quickly, but
the images took five minutes before they were completely downloaded.
This is a page of probably about 60K. I mentioned this to
demonstrate the kind of bandwidth that Microcom (and virtually
every other Nigerian ISP) has at 6:00 PM in the evening.
General ObservationsI asked at both at Microcom and Cyberspace if they could assist the
universities with installing their new satellite dishes. Both had
essentially the same equipment set up in their courtyards, but neither
had installed the satellites themselves. The satellites have been
installed by their outside service providers who sent a technician to
Nigeria to manage the installation. I asked around at a number of technical shops and was unable to find
a Nigerian technician who could install a send and receive satellite (as
opposed to a receive-only television dish.) There are plenty of
satellite dishes around the country collecting television signals, and
many, just to look at them, are obviously installed by local
technicians. The great question remains as to how much more
difficult and precise a send and receive satellite dish installation
might be. Both organizations, though, felt comfortable and confident about
their ability to configure their routers and switches and both were more
than happy to contract with the NUC to support the universities at this
level. I opted not to discuss prices or contracts, given that we
are still very preliminary in our planning.
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