The first Eko-Konnect stakeholders meeting since the pilot rollout was held at the Center for Information Systems and Technology, University of Lagos on March 15th 2012. Sixty principal officers, librarians and IT heads from 22 institutions and organizations met to review the progress of the association and deliberate on the next phase of linking all its members.
Prof. Charles Uwadia, Chair of the Eko-Konnect board of trustees welcomed the participants on behalf of the Vice-chancellor who had a conflicting appointment and could not attend. He set the stage with an overview of Eko-Konnect. He said its formation was triggered by the establishment of the Internet Exchange Point in Lagos in 2007 and the landing of international sea cables which made Internet bandwidth available at much less cost.
With the support of the Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria and Datasphir, institutions in the Lagos area met in December 2009 and resolved to interconnect in a collaborative network to provide a common front to service providers and in this way establish education networking in the developing telecoms environment.
Eko-Konnect subsequently got launched with a remit to build capacity to support campus networks, interconnect them and link to neighbours in ngREN and WACREN.
