It appears that the top telecommunications operators in the country have reduced their efforts at expanding network coverage & capacity (Especially in states that are not commercially viable) thanks to the harsh operating environment in the country. As a matter of fact, only a few number of base transceiver stations (BTS) have been built by both telcos and tower operators for network coverage and capacity. Even at that, the number of towers still remain within 26,000 as opposed to the required 180,000 base transceiver stations needed to effectively cover the country with improved quality of service.
Furthermore, an insider via NCW claims
that most Telcos no longer bother about extending coverage to
‘underserved areas,’ instead, “they are concentrating on optimizing
existing base stations for 4G LTE service and these are done in
commercially viable cities.”
Speaking on the issue, David Venn, Spectranet’s CEO was quoted saying:“Operators need equipment to build towers. In the last one year it has been difficult for us to access dollar to import equipment for network expansion as well as adding capacity, the ones we are doing is from the equipment we imported before the new policy on FX, for big operators it has been very difficult for them to import equipment which has affected their efforts in adding capacity.”
H/T: NigerianCommunicationsWeek.
NIce post
ReplyDelete