Nigerian Telecoms Operators Spend About N16 Billion Annually On Diesel

The worrisome state of power supply in Africa's most populous nation; Nigeria has inflicted untold hardship to the telecoms industry as telecommunication operators
purportedly spend as much as N16 billion annually on diesel generators that power each Base Transceiver Station (BTS), commonly known as base stations, according to a recent  ThisDay reports.

The Director, Public Affairs at the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Mr. Tony Ojobo, who confirmed this in a recent
radio programme, said: “Telecommunication operates within an eco-system, where you have other factors affecting it and one of
that is power. Currently power is a major cost for telecom operators.

He further went on to cite an example that "if one of the
major operators has about 4000 generators across the nation and this operator has to fuel all of his generators, and one of them
as at last year, spent about 4 billion naira on diesel alone.”

Estimating by the number of Global Systems for Mobile Communication (GSM) operators in the country, which currently stands at four, and which constitute the major operators in the country, it then implies that the four major
operators in the country, spend over N16 billion on diesel every year.

Analysis by experts in the telecoms industry have said that the huge resources could have been
channeled to other aspects such as; infrastructure development
and network expansion, to ease network congestion and poor telecoms service delivery.

Ojobo however noted that with the various efforts of government in the licensing of independent power producers and now with power becoming a little bit more stable, the
cost factor of diesel will be taken out in the long run and would not end up
being transferred to the consumers of telecoms services, whom he said, bear the burden of it all.