FG To Deploy 5G Network By January 2022

The Nigerian Government has announced plans to deploy the fifth-generation (5G) technology in the country in January 2022.

The Minister of Communication and Digital Economy, Isa Pantami, disclosed this on Thursday at a town hall meeting in Maiduguri, Borno State.

Represented by the NCC Commissioner for Technical Services, Ubale Maska, the minister stated that the 5G network would address the vandalism of power and telecommunications infrastructure in the country.

Maska explained that the technology would help track vandals destroying public assets across the country, adding the criminals would be arrested and prosecuted.

He stated that the need to deploy the modern system was due to the over 50,000 telecommunications sites across the country and about 16,000 outages recorded by mobile network operators (MTN, Glo, Airtel, 9mobile) between January 2021 and July 2021.

The minister explained that the outages were caused by fibre cuts, access denial and theft, leading to service disruption in the affected areas.

He condemned situations where telecoms installations were destroyed in terrorist attacks which had not been replaced as a result of the intense security issues and tensions in North East states.

Pantami asked the National Assembly to speed up the passage of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Bill for onward submission to Muhammadu Buhari for assent.

Naija News reports that President Muhammadu Buhari had recently authorised the deployment of 5G technology in the country.