By Prince Osuagwu in Cape Town , South Africa
CAPE TOWN— Etisalat Nigeria , yesterday at the AfricaCom Conference in Cape Town South Africa, announced that it has set aside about $2 billion to invest in the Nigerian telecommunications market to strengthen its network operation and services.

It also said it has surpassed six million active subscriber base which is a manifestation of the confidence Nigerians have on the network.

The company’s Chief Executive Officer, Mr Steven Evans, in a presentation entitled: “Investing in new markets and Infrastructure & growing your business as a new entrant” revealed that the target of his company was to achieve seven million subscriber base by the end of 2010, adding that it has built over 2000 cell sites in Nigeria, deployed services in all the 36 states of the federation and covering 55 per cent of Nigeria ’s population.

Evans revealed that Etisalat partnered with three backbone service providers including Alcatel and Huawei  to provide quality service to her customers adding that while Etisalat provided 50 per cent of the job, the three service providers offered 55 per cent of the total  job requirement.

However, he decried the lack of existing national backbone network in Nigeria, saying the heavy investments operators made in building their own backbone was responsible for the high tarrif subscribers witnessed in Nigeria for a long time.

“In case of Nigeria , the entire transmission backbone network in the country has been built by either the independent suppliers such as Phase3 Telecom, 21 Century technology or by the GSM operators themselves: Zain, MTN and Globacom. ”

So for us to get up and running, we had to essentially rely on the transmission been supplied by the third party,” he said.

For him, the telecommunication market in Nigeria was still a dynamic one but only heading to a mature stage.. He predicted that the voice services which has sustained the market would drop in the next two years even though the void would be filled by broadband services. Essentially

He however noted that having extensive broadband services in Nigeria was very important, added that the GSM service providers were expected to lead the way in the deployment of broadband services in the country.