Starcomms Hooks 500,000 Subscribers, Invests Over $100m
2007-04-18 13:53:33 | Viewed 1101 times
STARCOMMS, Nigeria’s leading CDMA telephony operator, last week celebrated what company managing director, Mr. Meher Subain described as its landmark achievement of hitting the half million subscribers base milestone, even as he hinted that the company has injected new investments worth over $100 million in its drive to capture a big chunk of the Nigerian market share.
The company which only recently was named among several others that won bid for National Unified Telecom license from regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) said it was ready to provide 3G telephony services beginning with three major cities of Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. “Our CDMA operating system is already configured in the 1900Mhz band range which is the 3G people talk.
We already have the technology. We already were 3G before the talk of licensing operators on the system even started. And, again what would happen in the coming weeks is that we are now ready to force down the pricing in the industry with our mobile operation rollout,” said Subain.
With new investments in the company hitting over $100 million, through a syndicated loan from local Nigerian banks, Subain said Nigerians should get better services from their telecom providers. “We got $100 million through a syndicated loan facility provided by Nigerian banks. We believe in Nigeria, because we’re a world class Nigeria company,” said Subain.
Mr. Subain’s excitement is not only about the prospect of just launching in the three major cities, but in the new technology Starcomms hopes to introduce into Nigeria that would give it an edge even over the top GSM providers.
“At our Abuja operations, we’re installing first of its kind ‘Next G telecom architecture’. It is the 21st century network and this facility is not available anywhere in Africa. Even in Europe and North America, British Telecom and AT&T are just discussing it. But we are deploying this technology in Abuja. This is 3.5G telecom technology that gives you 27 megabits on your downloads. I’m talking Broadband at the go...you do not have to wait until you get to a desktop or notebook. On your phone, you surf the internet with such speed,” Subain said.
And in the a bid to meet growing demands for its service, Starcomms also have adopted a ‘street-wise’ approach in marketing it products, in the process pushing over 500 lines on the network on a daily basis. “We discovered in Nigeria that everybody is so busy, especially in Lagos that you can virtually buy anything on the streets. On a daily basis, we deploy about 600 sales persons and they have been very faithful in their delivery. So that tells you that Nigerians are not what the world media make of them,” he said.
He believes with the current growth rate, Starcomms may soon push to become the leading telephony provider in the country. In the next two weeks also, Subain said, they company would be launching it’s 07028 mobile telephone series which already has a little over 25,000 subscribers since its introduction a little over a month a ago in Lagos.
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