Ligali, who apologised for the poor quality of GSM service being experienced, said: "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."
He further outlined other steps being taken to attain its aims as the start of work on its 4,000km fibre-optic transmission backbone project being executed by Nokia-Siemens Networks.
This, according to him, is in addition to the 2,000km of the existing 3,000km microwave backbone, both of which will be the widest in the country while adding 1,000 base stations to the existing 3,100 within this year.
He said: "We intend to double our switching capacity from 10 million to 20 million subscribers this year.
"Today, we were launching one into operational service. Next week, we shall launch another one in Kaduna. One each will be launched in Kano and Benin in the coming weeks with a total this year of 17 throughout the country."
He stated that Celtel currently had a total of 6,200 power generators, while making all their sites PHCN-compliant, complete with transformers in case the public utility improves.
In her speech, the Director-General of Consumer Protection Council, Mrs. Ify Umenyi, who described the event as the right step in the right direction as subscribers deserve to have better services, urged other GSM providers to emulate Celtel. She, however, urged Celtel to lead the way by refunding subscribers the money ordered by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
Nigerians want good service delivery."
He said they were not interested in wielding the big stick because their desire was to assist the GSM operators to give the best to Nigerians as more people would be employed if everything worked well with them and praised Celtel for upgrading the skills of its Nigerian employees.
The NCC had in February imposed a blanket ban on sales promotion by all GSM operators citing results of its latest quality of service (QoS) test carried out across the sector as reason.
The regulatory body also last Monday issued a directive to MTN and Celtel to pay N4.7 billion to subscribers on their network for poor quality of service (QOS) as at the end of January.
The body also warned the two operators it would impose N5 million and further N500,000 per day if they refuse or neglect to pay the compensation to the subscribers.
Source: This Day
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