I have read a lot of interesting comments about the “new nitel” or Ntel. Most people here do not think anything good will come out of the new baby but I believe with many others that something good will come out of this Nazareth.
And you if you don’t know, I think their signals are out there already. How do I know, if your phone has LTE, set it to LTE and see all the networks. You will find all the mobile providers in Naija there. You will see only one LTE network. It can only belong to one entity. You know who it is!

Here are some reasons why I believe Ntel as they are to be called will excel.

1. The consortium. Ntel is backed by a powerful consortium from sound and international companies with the financial muscle to move the company forward.

2. The Mobile technical partner. Ericson is the technical partner. In the early days of mobile phone in naija, some of us used Ericsson mobile phones. They then partnered with Sony and became Sony Ericsson. Ericsson latter sold that arm of the business to Sony. But many do not know that Ericsson is a power house in the provision of hardware including the mast and cell site hardware that are critical for mobile signal broadcast and reception.

3. The technology: LTE is the next big thing in mobile GSM communication and Ntel is launching with it. In Europe and countries like South Korea and Japan, LTE networks have hits speeds of over 100 Mbps. Ntel is promising something very close to this speed or even better. Even in some African countries, LTE is being rolled out massively. A case in view is South Africa. There are four major mobile service providers in that country. MTN, Vodacom, Telkom mobile and CellC. And they are massively rolling out LTE. With this kind of speed, you will be able to watch video content quite satisfactorily. I know because have been privileged to use Vodacom, Telkom mobile and MTN LTE in SA and the speed is great.

4. Nitel had deep roots. We all know Mtel and Nitel of old and the days of “not nine not”. While I do not know how long Nitel had been in existence. But for most of us, the only telephone service we knew growing up was Nitel. CDMA operators like intercellular started showing up in the 90s. Nitel has massive infrastructure and underground cabling system that is probably second to none in the country today. These system traverses through virtually every state in the country. And the nice thing is that most of it is fiber optics, the real juice for data. Ntel is inheriting most of the infrastructure from Nitel and these will be unleashed to satisfy their customers.

5. The power of Data: Data is now king and will continue to be for a long while to come. In fact in other climes where mobile telephone is used, income from voice has been decreasing and data has been increasing. The mobile providers in naija today are still milking us big time. It is laughable that we get excited at N 1000 for 1 gig of data. And we think it’s cheap! Tufiakwa! Most of us do not know that with spectranet for example, you can get 1 gig of data for as low as N 350 on some packages. Why are these gsm people milking us? At least we know it can be done. Ntel plans to have 50 million subscribers by 2020 and will be aggressively marketing data. With this, most of us will migrate. Ntel we are waiting for you!

6. The power of data 2. SAT 3. This is tied to data. This is one of the greatest assets they inherited from Nitel. It will put them in a vantage position to be able to compete in the data game.

7. Advantage of late entry. They have the advantage of learning from the mistakes and experience of their forefathers in the business as such they will be able to better position themselves to excel in the new market.

8. Right timing, data timing. Ntel is coming at the right time. Nigeria presently has about 100 million users of the mobile phone. And about 60 million users of the internet. Our population is about 200 million. You do the maths and you will see the number of those that are yet to be hooked up to the international gateway called the internet. These figures on usage are bound to sky rocket in the next few years. And it’s going to be mobile data all the way.

9. People will test it. Because you will give it a trial run, it will excel. If they can vomit the past Nitel we all know, and come up with great products and customer service, then they are good to go. Ntel has only one chance to impress you the customer. Nigerians are going to give you that one chance. If you can grab it with both hands then you are good to go.
Femi is a manager at http://www.shopandmall.com.ng an online store that enables you own your store, buy and sell online through auction and buynow features!

As long as it's own and operated by government it with fail. The only solution is for government to completely privatize nitel

Raiders:
As long as it's own and operated by government it with fail. The only solution is for government to completely privatize nitel

it is privatized already! It has new owners, no more a government entity!