THE competition for mobile phone customers thickened last week with the country's pioneer service provider, NetOne, castigating its competitors whom it accused of flooding the market with lines without developing their networks first.

Launching his company's latest product One-Extra, NetOne managing director Reward Kangai claimed that other service providers in the sector were targeting a subscriber base that they could not sustain.

The state-owned NetOne is now ranked third in terms of subscriber base after Telecel and Econet, the biggest operator.

"We are cognisant of the fact that there are millions of our prospective customers out-there waiting for the opportunity to lay their hands on the golden 011 line in spite of the recent proliferation of lines from other providers with underdeveloped networks," Kangai said.

"While others were falling over each other to inundate the market with lines, we chose to concentrate on first things first, putting requisite infrastructure on the ground, confident in the knowledge that when everything is said and done, NetOne will emerge the indisputable champion of quality of service and network coverage."

Kangai was apparently referring to the largest mobile service provider Econet and its other competitor Telecel which recently expanded their subscriber bases.

He said his company had been busy on research and development and the full impact of this would be felt in the next quarter through improved network quality, product availability in terms of sim cards and improved customer convenience.

He said as part of its growth exercise, NetOne last week added eight base stations in Bulawayo.

The company also added new base stations in Hot Springs, Lion's Den, Magunje, Guruve, Rushinga and Mberengwa, he said.

"Plans are also at an advanced stage to switch on more than 30 additional base stations in the western part of the country and this will result in 100% congestion free service in that part of the country," Kangai said.

He added that his company was also practising environment-friendly policies by installing solar-powered base stations mostly. Solar power also had an advantage of minimising service disruptions that may result from erratic power supply.

The service launched last Friday, OneXtra, is a bouquet of short message service (sms) based, value-added services.

The service is a collaboration between NetOne and its key partners including sim-card supplier Gemalto, technical partner Afrosoft, host bank First Banking Corporation, Mashonaland Turf Club, municipalities, medical aid societies, universities and colleges, the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange and the meteorological services office.

It allows for lotto betting via sms, a service which is already operational.

Other services to be soon activated include voting and requests on various Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation programmes, content access, covering college timetables and results, lotto results, news, stock updates, weather updates, commodity prices, movie schedules, sms broadcasting for utilities, municipalities and other merchants.