By MTN hits 10,000 base station milestone, ramps up efforts to boost QoS
MTN has rolled out a record 10,000 base stations across the country. MTN is backing on the additional base stations which are major component of the company’s infrastructure to have a direct impact on network capacity and the experience of customers.
MTN Nigeria Chief Executive Officer, Micheal Ikpoki affirmed his company’s commitment in significantly improving customers’ experience, by building on a track record of aggressive investment in the network to ramp up capacity and ultimately improve service quality.
“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,” he said.
With a population of 168.8 million, Nigeria has just 25,000 base stations compared to UK’s 65,000 base stations with a population of 63.23 million. Experts had argued that Telcos still need to invest more to improve Quality of Service. But not MTN according to Ikpoki, he stressed that with the following unrelenting investment, QoS has actually improved, but there is still room for improvement. Apart from crossing the 10,000 base station deployment mark, the company has also installed additional switching centres, aside from its world-class network management centre, 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. We are doing far in excess of that at MTN Nigeria. This year, we are going to be doing about 42 percent of revenue as capital investment. Last year we did 34 percent of revenue as capital investment,” he said.
