Poor Services: Telecoms Subscribers Want More Base Stations

President of National Association of Telecoms Subscribers (NATCOMS), Chief Deolu Ogunbanjo, on Friday advised telecom operators to erect additional Base Transceiver Station (BTS) to improve the quality of their services.

Ogunbanjo told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos that erecting more infrastructure would effectively reduce the number of dropped calls and improve the Internet speed.

According to him, telecom operators should ensure they erect additional masts to meet up with the increasing number of subscribers in the country.

Ogunbanjo decried the willful destruction of base stations and advised state governments to do everything possible to protect telecom infrastructure in their areas.

The NATCOMS official said the telecoms operators were still facing some challenges in the deployment of base stations.

He urged government to look into these challenges with a view to providing lasting solutions to them.

Ogunbanjo said that about 150 base-stations were lost in 2012 due to bombing and flooding.

He also said that many of these base stations were also affected by natural and man-made disasters.

Ogunbanjo said the low telecom tariff regime in the country was a welcome development as this had encouraged subscribers to make more calls.

The association president said that the low tariff regime would impact on the economy in the long run from the additional revenue that would accrue to government.

“Low tariffs from the operators have increased the number of calls frequency, hence the current BTS cannot accommodate effective service.

“With more base stations to accommodate the volume of voice calls, I am very optimistic that all telecoms operators will further reduce their tariffs,” he said.

Ogunbanjo said that the Number Portability Scheme had allowed subscribers to migrate to other networks of their choice and still maintained their original numbers.

He said the scheme would further motivate operators to improve on service delivery, tariff reduction and improved bandwidth services