According to the statement from ntel, “We are rolling out physical sites in three cities on our 900MHz and 1800MHz bands to launch Voice over LTE come April 8, 2016. We have signed agreements with trade partners and fulfilled all licence authorisations and payments and we are up-to-date and there are no impediments to our launch,” he said.
Abass said Natcoms Investments Limited, the parent company of ntel has projected over $1 billion investments over the next four years, for its rollout plan, which he said, would be in phases.
To ensure smooth take off of its mobile network rollout plan, ntel has completed the construction of Tier III Datacentre as well as reactivation of SAT-3 submarine international fibre optic cable.
Natcoms had last year paid $252.52 million to acquire the assets of the defunct first national operator (NITEL), to begin commercial operation on its mobile network. Noting that despite the growth of the telecoms sector in Nigeria which has seen voice subscriptions rise from less than 60,000 in 2001 to over 147 million as at 2015, he expressed fears that broadband usage has only grown by 20 per cent. He said NATCOM has come to fill the gap bringing Nigerians unfettered access to full mobile broadband both on voice and data services.
“Over the next four and half years, the total number of mobile broadband customers alone will be greater than all of the customers that have come into the market on mobile since its inception. In other words, we are at a point where a major transformation is in the making. You will see 168 million mobile broadband customers coming into existence between now and the end of 2019, which is more than all the mobile customers in both narrow and broadband that we have seen in the last 15 years.”
“That sounds like an enormous transformation. When it comes to the supply of broadband services, we are unique because we have more spectrum which can deliver more output than any network available today and potentially any network in the future. The spectrum we have has unique features which can not be compared with any other spectrum band,” Abass said.
Credit: thisdaylive