Two of Nigeria’s leading telecom firms, MTN Nigeria and Globacom, have embarked on a nationwide network expansion focused on bettering their services.
The companies will also change their Base Transceiver Stations and roll out new ones, projects to be implemented by the combined team of the telecoms operators’ engineers and their various technical partners, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and ZTE.
This comes after the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), fined the country’s four main mobile operators – including MTN and Bharti Airtel – some N1.17-billion (approx US$7.38 million) earlier in the year, for poor-quality service.
Customers had complained about the high rate of call drops and alleged illegal deductions, and inability to make calls after a voucher server, which allowed them to reload recharge cards crashed several times.
“The penalties are as a result of the contravention of the provisions of the quality of service regulations by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) as the operators failed to meet with the minimum standard of quality of service,” the NCC said.
During the upgrade, the companies have appealed to their subscribers to bear with them in case they experience any problems on the networks.
“We envisage that there may be slight inconvenience to our customers in certain areas, especially at night during the implementation of the project. For some other locations, especially where security situation may not allow our engineers to work at night, there may be temporary service difficulties in the course of our swapping equipment and optimising the network,” MTN explained.
Nigeria is MTN’s biggest market in Africa, with over 43 million subscribers in the country alone, out of the 21 countries in which the group operates. Poor network quality coupled up with lots of pricing competitions from its rivals, have been the company’s largest headache in the recent past.
