Straight Talk with Chukwudi Obi

ICT: Nigeria has been listed among top ten global markets for Smartphone along side South Africa and Egypt according to a latest Ericsson Mobility Report. As at April 2015, Nigeria’s telecom regulator Nigeria Communications Commission put the mobile subscriber database at 196,941,125. The report predicts that in 2020, Smartphone subscription will hit 6.1 billion with 80 per cent of the number coming from Asia Middle East and Africa (MEA) According to the report, the total African mobile subscription for the first quarter of 2015 stands at 910 million with 21 million new subscriptions added in the quarter. The report asserted that in markets such as Africa, there were rampant cases of multiple ownership of mobile numbers, thus increasing the total number of subscriptions. “The number of subscriptions exceeds the population in many countries. This is largely due to inactive subscriptions and multiple device ownership, for example - for business and private use,...

Nigeria joined the rest of the world to mark International Internet Day on October 29. Since 2005, the International Internet Day has been celebrated to commemorate a momentous day in the history of telecommunications and technology. The event commemorated is the sending of the first message, first electronic message which was transferred from one computer to another in 1969. This was situated in California, in the USA. At that time, internet was known as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). This was in 1969 when Charley Kline, a student programmer at the UCLA transmitted the first ever message on October 29, 1969. Charley Kline, whose supervisor was Professor Leonard Kleinrock, transmitted a message from the computer housed at the UCLA to a computer positioned at the Stanford Research Institute's computer. The two computers, one at the UCLA was the SDS Sigma 7 Host computer and the receiver was the SDS 940 Host at the Stanford Research Institute. Int...