The world is slowly turning into a global village and borders that once stood between cultures now serve as bridges for the enjoyment of the diversity between people of different races and ethnicities. At the forefront of this change is internet broadband, which serves as the catalyst for reforming the world into a web that connects over 7 billion people across the globe in split seconds.
“Broadband is to the 21st Century Information Age what Electricity was to the Industrial Age. It has a significant transformative effect on how people live and work. It empowers the individual user with previously unimaginable capabilities and global reach. The Internet is the world’s biggest library and largest repository of information and knowledge; while High Speed Access is critical to fully harnessing the benefits of the Internet.”
Any nation that recognizes the immense socio-economic importance of broadband services to national development should therefore seeks to ensure that the infrastructure necessary to provide ubiquitous broadband services is available and accessible to all citizens at affordable rates. The transformative benefits of having broadband available to all are clear and include improved learning, increased job creation, better community and civic engagement, improved trade and commerce, and a positive impact on GDP.
Darrel West, Vice President and Director of Governance Studies and Director of Center of Technology Innovation at Brookings Institution, Washington DC, USA argued that broadband access is a crucial driver of job creation and economic development. In other words, broadband is a catalyst for national development. It has played an important role in furthering economic development opportunities for small businesses, especially in rural areas.
In the world today, students are surrounded by a personalized and engaging world outside of the school, but they are unplugging not only their technology, but also their minds and passions too often when they enter their schools. Broadband connects pupils and information through handheld devices and electronic instructional sets. Students now learn at their pace. Personalization makes education more arousing from the students’ standpoint and increases the odds of mastery of important concepts. Teachers can also serve as instructional coaches through wired classrooms. An analysis of application stores for Blackberry, iPhone, and Android found that particular education downloads included Cosmic Discoveries, Wheels on a Bus, Ace Flashcard, Star Walk, English Dictionaries and so on which are productivity-enhancing applications.
In Nigeria today, entrepreneurs play a major role in the economics of this county. They launch companies, build businesses and provide employment opportunities. As the globe moves towards a digital economy, small and large scale businesses require mobile technology to provide boost for their companies. Broadband allows them to stay connected even on the go. This helps them remain in close contact with their customers, suppliers and banks both far and near. Due to their low cost and omnipresence, mobile technology has overcome digital disparities and inequities based on race and ethnicity. People living in rural areas have limited access to broadband and internet services which limits their development unlike fast growing cities like Lagos where use of broadband by businessmen is at its peak in Nigeria. Hence, investing in digital infrastructure of these areas provides means to improve the internet access in such remote areas can spur national development to unimaginable height.
Nigeria has yet fully made use of the potentials broadband and wireless technology offers in terms of healthcare. Only few Nigerians have e-mail reminders that remind them to take their medicine, mechanisms to measure satisfaction with doctors and hospitals, or visit websites that make healthcare ratings publicly aware to the patients. One of the virtues of e-health is that it puts patients in charge of monitoring their health. Results from monitoring devices used to measure weight, blood pressure, sugar levels, and pulse can be sent electronically via broadband to healthcare providers. This enables personalized feedbacks via emails when patients don’t take their medicine, gain weight, have high blood pressure, or have an uptick in their cholesterol levels. With these, patients take responsibility for their routine health care and rely on physicians for only serious medical conditions.
Nigeria’s Nollywood film industry was ranked third for globally generated revenue in 2011. It generated close to 126.4 billion Naira (about 800 million US Dollars) in the three years spanning 2010-2012. The two film industries ahead of Nigeria’s are the US’ Hollywood and India’s Bollywood. The global film and entertainment industry generated 14.5 Trillion Naira (90.6 billion US Dollars) in 2010. This was projected to increase to 16.2 trillion Naira (102.7 billion US Dollars) in 2012. The world has witnessed the increasing popularity of online media services like YouTube, Netflix, iTunes, and other media streaming or video-on-demand digital entertainment services but without broadband, online entertainment as we know it today would not exist.
The largest consumer demands for bandwidth are coming from Music, Movies, Videos, TV shows and Radio content downloads. The demand to download video content, such as a movie or TV show, within a short timeframe requires significant bandwidth. A single video download (typically 400Mb) over the internet is likely to require not less than 20Mbps in data transfer rates, to ensure fast delivery of less than twenty five seconds to the end user. Under such circumstances, narrowband dial-up users are no better off than those without internet access; in terms of the extent that they can use (or not use) the internet for high quality, high definition entertainment purposes. With the global phenomenon of the global movie industry, the demand for video traffic is now more prevalent for mobile TV, Desktop TV, Cable TV and HDTV watchers.
And as more of the world’s populations go online for entertainment, pressure on internet access infrastructure builds across the world - compelling a phenomenal worldwide shift towards high-capacity broadband networks. Greater bandwidth capability has become absolutely essential in order to prevent the networks from becoming congested with this traffic. Effective broadband infrastructure and distribution networks make this kind of growth possible, and aside from the impressive revenue that is being realized through the traditional global entertainment industry, broadband is permitting an enhanced revenue model for both the established and emerging small artists, and the media advertising agencies spreading their products and services across it.
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