The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has renewed plans to create an infrastructure sector to facilitate broadband penetration as well as subsidising it in order to ensure availability of broadband in both urban and rural parts of the country.

Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman of the NCC, said the creation of broadband infrastructure would effectively improve Nigeria's Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry as well as other sectors of the economy.

Juwah said the NCC was taking measures to ensure that broadband was made available to boost the telecoms service in the country.

He said the regulatory authority would appoint consultants to work with in order to create a favourable platform for broadband availability, since the country was lacking such broadband infrastructure.

Juwah said Nigerian cities would be structured to make the Commission’s intention possible and that the appointments of consultants would be done in the shortest possible time to complement the efforts of telecoms operators in the roll out of fibre optic infrastructure.

He said the database created from the exercise would be the first available to the government and that the data of the entire subscribers in the telecoms sector was currently being uploaded to the backup server of the Commission to ensure an effective information base to the country.

“The SIM card registration exercise would not come to an end as some misconstrued it to be, but what the NCC has done is to collect data of existing and new subscribers to know who is on which network and for security purpose, as well as create a database of citizens in the country,” Juwah said.