By Prince Osuagwu

MTN Nigeria at the weekend announced that it has rolled out a record 10,000 base stations across the country. The additional base stations, according to the company, will contribute to significant improvements to quality of service.

Speaking in his office recently, MTN Nigeria Chief Executive Officer, Michael Ikpoki, said the company is focused on three major areas, one of them being significant improvement of customer experience. He said that MTN would be building on a track record of aggressive investment in the network to ramp up capacity and ultimately improve service quality.

According to him, MTN has led the industry in terms of rapid network rollout, adding that the company’s aggressive drive to significantly improve customer experience on the network in the last few months has led to record deployment of base stations across the country.

“In the last few months, we have ramped up our rollout. Last month we had a record rollout figure and we are currently rolling out up to 300 sites a month to make sure that we have enough capacity. We are getting more head-room, more dormant capacity in the network. That way, we can carry more traffic and give our customers a decent quality of service on a consistent basis. Indeed, there has been noticeable improvement and this will continue,” Ikpoki said.

He added that apart from crossing the 10,000 base station deployment mark, the company has also installed additional switching centres and approximately 20,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable cross country and around metropolitan hubs.

“If you look at our investment portfolio from inception till now, MTN has invested more than a trillion naira. From whichever angle you look at it, by normal indices in terms of investment ratio, in most emerging markets, any ratio above 15-17 percent of revenue is a decent ratio in terms of investment.