By Prince Osuagwu
MTN Nigeria yesterday, joined its counterpart Airtel Nigeria, to also announce compensation to its Blackberry users over the global outage of Blackberry services last week.

MTN Nigeria, announced that it will compensate all customers on the service with a four-day extension on their current subscription.

The compensation package, according to MTN was in spite of the fact that the outage was caused by a server failure from Research in Motion (RIM), the global provider of BlackBerry services.

According to the company’s Corporate Services Executive, Mr Akinwale Goodluck, the compensation package is for the inconveniences MTN customers experienced during the downtime.

He said that “MTN is a customer focused organization and we are aware of the inconvenience our customers suffered during the down time. That is why, in spite of the fact that the three-day BlackBerry disruption was caused by an incident outside our control, we will extend by 4 days, the subscription of affected pre-paid and post-paid BlackBerry subscribers”

During the outage, messaging and web browsing on BlackBerry were halted across many parts of the world. However, after the traumatising period users all over the world have been asking for compensation for the pains of not connecting to loved ones and business associates.

Ironically, all the demands have always gone to the operators who offer the blackberry services on their mobile platform, leaving real service providers, Research In Motion, RIM with very little to worry about.

Many operators denied culpability to the problem and therefore claimed no responsibility to compensation. In the other hand, a lot of operators from different countries of the world including the United States of America, South Africa and Qatar among others, have however agreed on one form of compensation or the other, to assuage the frail nerves of their subscribers who mainly subscribe to the Blackberry services using their mobile lines.

At the wake of those compensation announcements, Nigerian subscribers also made frantic calls for compensation.

However, Airtel Nigeria, announced, Monday, that it has decided to compensate its Blackberry subscribers in spite of the fact that the outage was no fault of theirs. The company’s Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Mr. Rajan Swaroop, while announcing the compensation, said that “we remain concerned about the inconvenience this has caused to all our BlackBerry users earlier this week and we would like to compensate both our pre paid and post paid customers for the inconvenience as best we can.

“For our pre paid customers, we will extend the subscription of the services for the month of October by three days. We are communicating this to the affected customers through SMS.”

Swaroop also added that, “for our Post Paid customers, who are customers paying their bills at the end of every month, we will waive three days off the BlackBerry monthly rental for the month of October. The three day waiver will be reflected in the monthly bill sent to all our post paid BlackBerry users for the month of October.”