MTN Approves N125b To Tackle Poor Service

By Aaron Ukodie

10th Dec 2007

The board of MTN Nigeria has approved $1 billion (N125 billion) in a bid to tackle the worrisome case of unsatisfactory quality of phone service in its network across the country.

Competent company officials who disclosed the amount at the weekend did not give full details of the project implementation work. But it was said that implementation has begun earnestly in the last days of 2007 and would increase in 2008. "Funds are in place and we are now able to carry out faster roll out than before and anywhere in the MTN Group", says an official who further explained that the benefits of the investment would soon be felt.

The approval of the lump sum is motivated by the need to reduce the company’s budgeting and project financing and implementation cycle to about nine months in response to the Nigerian operating environment which they noted, is difficult to predict. A longer project implementation cycle as is the model in other environments has not helped the Nigerian case that requires specific forecasting methods, officials noted.
Officials said, however, that the money will empower them to build more base stations and re-engineer the network by ensuring that black spots in the network are covered. New traffic forecasting methods will be employed in the engineering of base stations to take care of talk and traffic volume.

With the dwindling public power provision, the fund will also help the company provide more generating sets to serve as back up to power the base stations for better performance and to reduce downtime.
Also, the fund will enable MTN upgrade its network to deliver 3G services in the New Year. MTN officials also noted that GSM operators are currently facing increasing case of loss of qualified manpower in the telecommunications sector. They maintained that qualified Nigerians who after garnering experience and training in the Nigerian environment prefer to leave for Asian and Middle -Eastern countries that present more pay prospect for them.

Quality of phone service in the networks of the GSM operators has been unsatisfactory in the past five months leading to complaints by phone users, various probes by Nigerian law makers and meetings of stakeholders in efforts to find lasting solutions.

The Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Ernest Ndukwe had told the Senate Committee which visited him last week that general Network Capacity inadequacies; careless sales promotions that encourage minutes of call without regard to capacity constraints; delayed deployment of necessary switches, transmission BTS’s; general shortage of experienced manpower within operating companies are some of the causes of poor quality of phone service.

In a report recently submitted by the House of Representatives Adhoc Committee on the gradual decay of services provided by GSM operators it was recommended, among others, that: "The NCC should immediately issue a directive to all network operators specifying interconnect exchanges as the approved path for handling inter-network traffic and compel them to make use of existing licenced interconnect exchange houses.

"This will check call barring by network operators and allow for concentration by network operators on intra network traffic."

Source: The Independent

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