The Corporate Services Executive, MTN, Mr. Wale Goodluck, who revealed this during an interactive session with journalists on Wednesday, said the company’s $40m rural telephony project had led to the erection of 350 base stations across the country.
MTN had on October 21, 2010, signed a $40m deal with Huawei Technologies to implement rural telephony infrastructure in about 850 villages across the country.
This was after the telecoms company discovered that about 40 million Nigerians, especially in the rural areas, did not have access to basic telephone services.
A nationwide survey by MTN revealed that over 850 villages had never had access to any form of telecommunications services.
The goal, according to MTN, is to cover every village in the Nigeria.
Huawei was expected to deploy latest base stations technology that consumed low energy.
Several months after the signing, Goodluck said the project had been on course and that 350 base stations had been built.
He said, “Our rural telephony project has been quite successful. About 340 base stations under the rural telephony project are now alive and working. The way the base stations are built is different from the way others are built. The tariff plan in the rural communities is different from what we charge in other places.”
Goodluck further said that MTN would be investing $1.4bn in network expansion in 2012, adding that the proposed investment represented 45 per cent of the total capital expenditure of the entire MTN Group for 2012.
He explained that a significant part of the money would be invested in expanding the core and radio networks as well as building metropolitan fibre network and backhaul technology.
Explaining why the MTN Group is spending an enormous part of its resources in Nigeria, Goodluck said Nigeria contributes immensely to the group’s revenue. Goodluck added that the WACS, MTN submarine cable which landed in Nigeria last year would go live by the end of April, 2012.
Source: The Punch
