Hamisu Muhammad
5 August 2008
Nigeria has recorded another milestone in telecommunications sector by attaining 53 million active telephone lines as at June, 2008, statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) revealed.
NCC's record made available to Daily Trust yesterday sho-wed that the nation recorded 53,332,149 million active lines on the network as at end of June 2008, saying that the figure has pushed Nigeria's teledensity to 38.09%, which translates to about 38 phones to 100 Nige-rians.
Chief Executive of the Nigerian Communications Commission, Engr. Ernest Ndukwe who announced the latest figures at the weekend during the Consu-mer Parliament which held at Excellence Hotel, Ogba, Ikeja in Lagos, however, frowned at the attitude of the service providers for not providing enough custo-mer care centres for the consu-mers to easily and quickly resolve their complaints.
Arising from submissions of the subscribers during the ses-sion, Engr. Ndukwe said a situa-tion where only very few custo-mer care centres exist, and are far-in-between from the consu-mers, was no longer acceptable to the Commission.
He said none of the operators was doing well in this regard, adding that customer care centres must be available in all cities and even various commu-nities in the country, and must be well manned and accessible.
He informed the operators, and the consumers in attendance that the commission would come up with minimum standards with respect to what each operator must do to ensure that customer care centres were available and accessible, nationwide.
Engr. Ndukwe also cautioned phone users on the need to use approved handsets as the qua-lity of phones in use contribute to quality of service. He said some of the handsets have low amplification internally, thereby degrading the service unless the user is very close to the base stations, while others have low quality earphones which make reception very difficult. In those cases, he said the user would be blaming the network while the problem is from the handset. He said the Commis-sion would soon publish details of the approved handsets in the print media but that the list of these sets is available on the NCC website.
On the improved teledensity for Nigeria, the NCC boss said "with these latest figures, Nigeria has taken a bold lead in Africa in terms of telephone availability to the population and we must congratulate our-selves on this development. This means that more and more Nigerians are having access to telephone facilities which is one of the main objectives of the Commission".
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