MTN Nigeria is currently planning to move about 2 million Visafone, Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) subscribers to its Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) network in order to make use of Visafone spectrum for planned 4G service roll out, BusinessDay can now reveal.
BusinessDay’s inside sources at MTN said the company had found it necessary to migrate existing Visafone subscribers to the GSM platform in order to fulfil all regulatory requirements that Visafone had been given before it could roll out Fourth Generation Long Term Evolution (4G LTE) services.
MTN confirmed the completion of the acquisition of Visafone in January 2016 under the conditions to improve the quality of broadband services for its subscribers.
According to Amina Oyagbola, MTN executive, “the acquisition was to leverage Visafone’s 700 MHz spectrum for service enhancement, especially in broadband services.”
“One of the requirements given to Visafone before it could roll out 4G LTE was to vacate its CDMA network spectrum, which was too high for CDMA services and was interfering with spectrums of other internet service providers.
“In the short term, we need to put the customers somewhere so that we can fulfil the mandate in the requirements to vacate the spectrum, that is why we are moving customers to the GSM network for now,” our source said.
This is not coming as a surprise for many as Ferdi Moolman, CEO, MTN Nigeria, while speaking on the acquisition of Visafone a few months back, said: “The Visafone transaction was very important to us because it will enable us achieve broader access to Nigerians. We need Visafone’s frequency to roll out LTE broadband in Nigeria.”
In line with Jim Ovia, founder of Visafone Communications Limited’s statement that Visafone remains open for business and will be leveraged to expand MTN’s roll out of its LTE broadband services, MTN said: “We have not said that this is a permanent state. Visafone still remains an entity in the sense that even when the customers move platform, we retain their identity, which is their current phone numbers and the products and services which have been approved for Visafone.”
“Within a month or two, we should be able to migrate all customers to the GSM platform so that we can tidy things up and use the spectrum for what it should be used for and if things go as planned, in the next few months we should be able to roll out LTE services,” MTN added.
The telecoms firm revealed that from next week, it would start communicating to customers to go to the nearest MTN or Visafone service centre and swap their SIM cards to GSM SIM cards for free and retain the same number.
