HARARE Zimbabwes largest mobile phone operator Econet Wireless says the network expansion phase it launched in February last year is nearing completion.
“In the next three months, we expect to commission a lot of systems that have been under construction during the last 12 months,” Econet Wireless chief executive, Douglas Mboweni, announced last week. Until the advent of dollarisation in early 2009, Econet had been constrained in its ability to raise money to invest in the network. Mboweni said Econet had managed to raise over US$300 million during 2009 for investment and the money had gone into the purchase of equipment and towards hiring international contractors.
“The process of raising money, ordering equipment, and bringing in contractors to build and install equipment takes time. In our case, we were not only expanding capacity but also replacing obsolete equipment that had not been replaced in 10 years. It was like starting from scratch,” he said. Work on building the core system has now been completed. “We are sitting on a prepaid system capacity of 5.1 million and we are carrying just three million subscribers at present. We have built over 400 base stations, of which 200 will come on line in the next six weeks alone,” Mboweni said.
Econet will begin to commission its fibre optic system in the major cities by March. This will completely eliminate one of the major causes of congestion on a network, and also upgrade the provision of data services, including 3G. On 3G, Mboweni said: “The current system is small and limited to the Harare area. By March, it will be fully national, and vastly improved in terms of capacity and speed. We will have a world class 3G system by the time we get to June.”
The Econet boss said that while completion of the network upgrade and expansion had been the priority over the last 12 months in order to build a stable network, management would place more focus on customer service quality. He explained that there were three phases to the work on customer service. “Our first priority is to build a system that is stable and congestion free, with the capability to provide the most up-to-date services available anywhere in the world. By the time we get to June that will have been accomplished.
Post published in: News