From July this year, MTN subscribers in selected cities will be able to get high-speed 4G data service on any of their mobile devices.
MTN Nigeria’s CEO Ferdinand Moolman disclosed that MTN has started the process of migrating all of Visafone subscribers onto its network so that it could vacate the 800MHz frequency band and start rolling out LTE.
The executive was cited as saying: “It delayed our capital expenditure rollout during the first quarter a little bit because we needed to realign some of our CAPEX towards the LTE rollout. We started the migration of the subscribers and we hope to conclude that soon. The plans are to have commercial LTE available towards the end of the second quarter, maybe early Q3 2016, albeit very limited, and then start expanding this towards … the first quarter of next year.”
The chief financial officer, MTN Group, Bret Goschen, said, “We have been engaging with our major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and vendors and ensuring that the CAPEX rollout continues as planned. We are very close to finalising short-term arrangements, bridge-type facilities with the vendors, and then longer term arrangements around the ECA-backed credit financing we should have in place by the mid year.”
In January 2016, MTN finalised the acquisition of Lagos-based Visafone, reportedly paying N47.5 billion ($238.7 million) to obtain its assets (including spectrum in the 800MHz band and roughly 2.1 million subscribers) in order to strengthen its position in the Nigerian wireless broadband market.
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