‘Indigenous satellite will provide better, cheaper services in Africa’

The Nigerian Communication Satellite (NigComSat) will provide the best and cheapest satellite services to subscribers within Africa, NigComSat Managing Director, Timasaniyu Ahmed-Rufai, has said.

Mr Ahmed-Rufai told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Tuesday that the satellite had been designed to effectively focus on Africa with better reception.

According to him, “Our services are better, our footprints are better than any satellite that is overseeing Africa. The design of the satellite also took into consideration the weather conditions of Africa.

“We narrowed the footprint of the satellite to make it regional so that we can have a higher power and spend less on customer premises equipment because small dishes can be used for perfect reception.”

He explained that customers would be spending half the amount of money they would have spent to get their work done since they could push two times more traffic than they are allocated.

Mr Ahmed-Rufai said that more than 25 percent of the cost of acquiring satellite bandwidth was as a result of middlemen, but that with NigComSat, customers could buy directly.

He said that for small and medium-enterprises that could not afford to go into long lease, there would be room for them “to pay about three months up-front and then issue a bank guarantee for repayment”.

He, however, disclosed that it would take about three to four years for the company to sell off 100 percent of the satellite’s capacity after it was launched.

According to him, this is so because most satellite customers go into long lease and, as such, the would-be customers of NigComSat still had some years on their current satellite provider.