Bankole Photo: Sun News Publishing

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Against the backdrop of the prevailing poor quality service by GSM operators in the country, the Speaker of House of Representatives, Hon. Dimeji Bankole has charged the service providers to improve on their services and at the same time review downward their tariff to suit the affordability of subscribers.

Bankole who spoke at the unveiling of the Celtel Rural Acquisition Initiative, (RAI) in Abuja also urged the GSM operators in the country to embrace the idea of sharing their infrastructure as well as their facilities such as masks, fibre optics cables and the rest to improve on the network in the country.
According to Bankole, “sharing of infrastructure can lead to network improvement among service providers.

If one operator has facilities in a particular location, I think in the spirit of understanding and business partnership, instead of another insisting on mounting similar facility, there should be an understanding among them such that the very facility should serve others.”
He reasoned that the arrangement would reduce financial cost and huge expenditure by the operators which has become permanent excuses on why they could not improve on the network and general services.

In his remarks, Chairman of Celtel Nigeria , Mr. Gamaliel Onosode explained that the idea of the initiative was to engage rural entrepreneurs as our trade partners, to make them exclusive representatives of Celtel products and services specifically introduced low denominations and give them responsibility for level 1 BTS maintenance and security so that they operate them on revenue sharing basis.

He said Celtel has risen from just over 1000 base stations in May 2006 when it acquired Vmobile to over 3200 as at the end of March 2008 stating further that the development has “come a commensurate growth in our coverage as well as capacity. I should also add that our subscriber base has almost tripled from 5.4 million in May 2006 to almost 13 million”.

“We are working aggressively to boost the robustness of our network and we intend to invest a further $1 billion this year to give to Nigerians what they want as we expand our coverage, capacity, quality and excellent customer service”, he assured.

The RAI initiative according to Mr. Bayo Ligali, Chief Executive Officer of Celtel, has rolled out in the pilot schemes in the south-east of Nigeria over 500 AD motor cycles to the first beneficiaries. He said the rate would be increased in the second phase.

He stated that the with the scheme, Celtel has not only achieved the objective of heeding the clarion call of the federal government on rural telephony, but has serve as empowerment to several businessmen to contribute to the economic development of their communities.