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Nigeria: Why GSM Services Are Horrible
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This Day (Lagos)
9 May 2008
Posted to the web 9 May 2008
Patrick Ugeh
Abuja
Celtel's General Manager for North CentralRegion, Mr Babatunde Lawson, has stated that the decision to share theproceeds from the licences issued to operators by the Federal and State government instead of using it toprovide infrastructure as proposed, is responsible for the poor GSM services being experienced in the country.
Lawson who stated this in Abuja at the on-going trade fair said that it also had to do with the fact that most of the affectedoperators took on more subscribers than they had thecapacity to handle.
According to him, while charging $280 million dollarsper licence issued to the GSM providers, thegovernment promised to use the money to provideinfrastructure like power. He however lamented that the government reneged on itspledge to the extent that the companies were nowproviding electricity on their own, with Celtel havingabout 6,000 generating sets to keep its facilitiesrunning.
Claiming that Celtel had 98 per cent availability,Lawson said: "People bite more than they can chew. We (Celtel) don't bite more than we can chew."To buttress this, he said his network had a capacityfor 20 million subscribers but currently had 13million with "substantial room for seven million."
He said the company's intention was to retain itsnumber one position in the country's telecoms serviceprovision, noting that as Econet, they were the firstto hit 200,000 and 300,000 before problems set in andwere overtaken.
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