Ethiopia’s monopoly telecommunications provider has claimed the country can expect Long Term Evolution (LTE) by 2015, bringing fast mobile Internet.
Ethio Telecom held their third enterprise event in which they discussed “common issues of interest” with their enterprise customers and planned future engagements.
Bruno Duthoit, Ethio Telecom’s Chief Executive, said the company will “devote all effort towards improving qualities of services,” which have been a major source of complaints from customers for several years.
Despite customer complaints, Ethio Telecom has, in the past few years, developed new products and tariffs and expanded its customer base of around 20 million.
It is currently engaging vendors in negotiations for an expansion of telecommunications infrastructure and a general improvement to quality of services.
The expansion plans include an Internet broadband strategy with an expected introduction of LTE in Addis Ababa as well as High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) in all large cities in the country and universal Internet access when the projects are completed by 2015.
“In this regard, Ethio Telecom recently launched a program called Together towards Quality, which include 26 concrete projects aimed at accelerating actions to correct current situations and put the company in a situation to deliver its promise,” Duthoit said.
The company has launched enterprise specific products and services such as business mobile services, indirect channels to reach more enterprise customers throughout the country and have appointed sales executives in regional offices to serve its business customers.
“We have also developed new products and services to offer to enterprise customers such as the mobile machine to machine business solution and 3G VPN and upcoming products such as hybrid business mobile, GPRS and prepaid roaming services,” added Duthoit.
