ABUJA, April 27 (Xinhua) -- The current telecommunications infrastructure in Nigeria is not enough for the Africa's most populous country to rise to a "smart world" status, a local official said on Thursday.
Speaking at an event in Lagos, Umar Dambatta, head of the Nigerian Communications Commission said the country currently has less than 50,000 telecommunications base stations, whereas it needs at least 80,000 base stations to actualize its dream of being a smart country.
"Such a number of base stations would spur Nigeria to join countries working toward making Internet of Things (IoT) a reality," the official said.
According to him, the west African nation's IoT dream could be realized by leveraging on fourth generation (4G) and 5G networks.
"3G, 4G going to 5G networks are going to usher this country into smart applications, the Internet of Things or the smart world and cities we are talking about," he posited, noting the present capacity of telecommunications infrastructure is grossly inadequate to cater for the effective capacity that is needed to deploy 4G going to 5G.
