Ezekiel Fatoye; an engineer and a strong force in the telecommunication industry in Nigeria for four decades. An ex-Executive Director at NITEL and MultiLinks, he is also on the management team at Spectranet. Fatoye was part of innovations in the telecommunications. After his tenure as executive director in NITEL, he started Nigeria’s first private telecommunications firm, Multilinks, and at the advent of GSM, moved out of that market before the collapse of CDMA. Fatoye was born April 14, 1928 in Gbongan, Osun State.
Knowing the government’s leanings towards the breaking of their own monopoly in the telecommunications, Fatoye made haste to position himself to be able to compete if eventually government brought in private people to invest in the sector. Believing in the future of data, Fatoye wanted to create a combination of data and television like in Britain where Sky presents a complete bundle of both in homes of users. Plans to collaborate Sky London for content buying was not followed through and effort to run fibres to homes in Abuja and Lagos was frustrated. Fatoye simply could not have cooperation of the government. Fatoye’s Spectranet is up and running in major cities, but only few of them: Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt, and Ibadan. Fatoye took part in the formation of the NCC 1. The first unified license numbers by Multilinks, Fatoye’s pioneer private telecommunication outfit, was launched February 8, 2007 2.
1, NATION October 15, 2016
2. TELL February 26, 2007
