A new switch centre built at a cost of $6 million (about N720 million) by the mobile communication firm, Celtel, in Abuja has been formally commissioned.
At the launching on Thursday, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the GSM provider, Bayo Ligali, publicly apologised to its subscribers for the poor quality of service being offered at the moment.
Ligali announced that Celtel is committing $1 billion (about N120 billion) this year in quality of service improvement.
About 10 senators and other key industry stakeholders attended the ceremony.
The commitment, Ligali said, is in addition to the construction of a $10 million national network monitoring centre to facilitate real time fault detection and speedy rectification to significantly reduce downtime.
Describing the new switch centre in Abuja as an important element of Celtel’s agenda for changing the telecommunications landscape in Nigeria, Ligali assured that with the facility, quality of service would improve by 99 per cent.
“I would be the first to admit that the quality of service we are offering today does not meet the expectations of our subscribers. And for this, we are deeply sorry,” said the Celtel CEO.
He assured that in spite of the unfriendly operating environment, “I commit on behalf of my colleagues at Celtel Nigeria that we shall do all that it takes to meet the expectations of our customers by giving them what they want: quality, coverage and excellent customer care.”
On other key highlights of Celtel’s quality improvement plan, he spoke of planting additional 1,000 base stations in 2008 to achieve full coverage of the six geo-political zones of the country and doubling it’s the switch capacity from 10 million to 20 million subscribers this year.