EARLY BROADCAST: “We were broadcasting on the internet long before CNN” — Quaynor recalls NCS’s pioneering digital push

Long before live broadcasting on the internet became a routine part of global media, a Ghanaian technology company was already experimenting with it.

Professor Nii Narku Quaynor says the National Communications Services (NCS) was broadcasting on the internet before CNN and other major players entered the space.

The claim emerged as Quaynor reflected on the scale of what NCS had built during Ghana’s early internet years.

At its peak, the organization had about 87 employees and was involved in several areas of technology and communications.

But its ambitions went beyond simply connecting people to the internet.

It had its own media operation.

“We’re broadcasting on the internet long before even CNN and all these people started,” Quaynor told Kafui Dey.

For Quaynor, that was an indication of just how far ahead NCS was trying to push the possibilities of the new technology.

The organisation was not merely providing access.

It was experimenting with what could be delivered through the internet at a time when the technology was still unfamiliar to much of the public.

That history is also why Quaynor remains deeply reflective about what eventually happened to NCS.

Looking back, he wonders what the organization could have become if it had been allowed to continue developing.

“Could it be the next Google?” he asked.

It was a question that captured the scale of the opportunity he believes Ghana had in its hands.

NCS had emerged at a time when Ghana was only beginning to find its place on the global internet.

Quaynor had earlier explained that the country’s first internet traffic began around 1993, initially relying on just 10 telephone lines.

The connection was limited and expensive, but it provided enough access for users to send and receive email, browse and engage with early online services.

Within that environment, NCS was already exploring possibilities that would later become central to the modern internet.

But the company eventually shut down.

For Quaynor, the end of NCS represented more than the closure of a business.

It was the loss of an organisation that, in his view, had the potential to become something much bigger.

That feeling becomes particularly strong whenever he passes the former NCS premises.

Asked what comes to mind when he sees the place today, his answer is blunt.

“Missed opportunity.”

Then he points and says: “Wasted.”

According to Quaynor, the former premises are no longer being used for the kind of technological work that once took place there.

“They making cement there of all the things you could do,” he said.

The contrast is difficult to miss: a place where people were experimenting with the future of the internet is now associated, in his recollection, with cement production.

Yet Quaynor does not speak as though the collapse of NCS ended his own journey.

“They’ve done it. They’re gone. I’m still doing mine,” he said.

“And I have not stopped.”

For a pioneer who says his organisation was experimenting with internet broadcasting before some of the world’s biggest media names, the unfinished question is perhaps not what NCS achieved.

It is what Ghana might have achieved if it had been allowed to keep building.