MTN rolls out fixed lines tomorrow

Leading telecommunications company MTN Nigeria, has concluded plans to roll out its fixed services in the ancient city of Ibadan, capital of Oyo State, tomorrow, just as the telco weekend launched an online customer care centre in the commercial nerve centre of the nation, Lagos.

The coming of its fixed lines, the telco said, would enable subscribers to have true fixed services running on fibre optic technology in their homes and offices.

Dubbed MTN HyConnect, the telco said is bundled with the internet at broadband speeds of between 64 kilobytes per seconds (kbps) and 2 megabytes per second (mbps).

Affirming this, the Corporate Services Executive, MTN Nigeria, Mrs. Amina Oyagbola, said that the official launch of the service in Ibadan has been scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, August 7, and is expected to be available in every part of Ibadan.

The lines, according to a press statement from the telco, quoted her as saying that it would also offer superior quality of voice calls and call rates as low as N5 for intra network calls.

“It is however currently available at the three launch locations of Bodija, Ring Road and Dugbe,” she said, adding that MTN HyConnect is already running in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt while efforts are ongoing to take the service to Aba, Kano, Calabar, Kaduna, Warri, Ilorin, Onitsha, Benin, Jos Maiduguri among many other cities nationwide.

Meanwhile, MTN has launched state-of-the-art Online Customer Assistance Centre at its Ojota Network Monitoring Centre in Lagos.

Announcing this at a press briefing weekend, the Customer Relations Executive, Mr. Akin Braithwaite, said it is a next generation customer care service facility with cutting-edge technology intended to serve its subscribers through the telephone, short messaging service (SMS), internet and other means by which customers could communicate with them in the online world.

He also said this is a major feat for the telco because the centre is anchored on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), through which they could communicate anywhere through VoIP, stating that this gives the telco a lot of dynamic ability to handle customer call coming from anywhere.

Mr. Braithwaite also said the implication is that it gives customers opportunity to service additional 3.5 million customers, and that this would ease a lot of traffic congestion that is currently facing the telco at the friendship shops.

He added that this is just a step in a series of programmes that would be costing the MTN hundreds of millions of dollars in building additional online customers’ assistance centres.

According to him, “this is just to show the importance that MTN places on serving the customer. We are on a journey and we are going to see more and more improvement on the way we serve our customers, as we are providing next generation customer care.”

Also speaking, the Chief Information Officer of the centre, Mr. Chris Coetzee said, the planning took three years to accomplish and the facility is also the main data centre that hosts all of the applications that supports its customers, both from the billing perspective, provisioning as well as the technology in use in the call centres.

“What we did was that we moved the customer phasing and customer servicing organizations closest to the heart of information technology (IT),” he said.
He further said co-locating these facilities is a major step in the telco’s ability to serve customers better, stressing that the centre is one of the largest in Africa, outside South Africa and that in the next few weeks another bigger one would be launched.

Subscribers on the network who are experiencing any difficulty recharging or any other problem could call 182 and 188 or visit its website.

Some other members of MTN at the briefing were the human resources executive, Mutari Wada, Andrew Esemezie, Ibrahim Abba Gana, Ibrahim Umar, Patience Alumba as well as Temiloye Okudipe.


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