ATCON mulls how national roaming can work

Industry Stakeholders have called on the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to provide more incentives to ensure mobile telephony users enjoy seamless network services across the country.

The Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), which recently made this position known added that national roaming was only achievable if the country attains about 95 percent nationwide coverage.

Mr. Olusola Teniola, ATCON President, said, “There was a stakeholders’ forum last year where the issue was deliberated on extensively.

National Roaming assumes that 95 percent geographical coverage, because in its simplicity form, you are making a call and suddenly the network goes down, so, the operator, under the national roaming, will be allowed to patch that call to go on another cell which belongs to another operator.”

He advised the Federal Government to liaise with both the States and Local Government and plan on how best to support telecom operators to deploy infrastructure for improved quality of service.

It is now common knowledge; he said that the recent placement of IT/telecoms equipment among the forty-one restricted items from accessing foreign exchange at CBN rate, is stifling investment and development in the sector.

“That requires investment and invariably, forex. If you are not allowing that happen, what then are we going to share. There is maximum capacity we need to increase (infrastructure) sharing.

Ensuring the enabling environment, allowing operators to import equipment will help address some of the issues in the industry at the moment.

“It makes economic sense to share (co-location). In some quarters, there are questions as why telcos are not expanding as should, but our argument has been that we need some balance from the Government to make this happen”.