Africa’s largest telecoms group, MTN announced that it will commercially launch the 4G LTE service in Nigeria by July this year in selected cities. The operator will deploy its LTE services in the 800MHz frequency band that it received as part of the acquisition of Visafone earlier this year. MTN Nigeria paid N47.5 billion to acquire Visafone’s assets.
The operator said that it has started the process of migrating all of Visafone subscribers onto its network so that it could vacate the 800MHz frequency band. MTN plans to leverage its existing sites to roll out the service and in addition plans to have about 1,500 LTE co-located sites backhauled with fiber optics this year.
Bret Goschen, CFO, MTN Group
We are very close to finalizing short-term arrangements, bridge-type facilities with the vendors, and then longer term arrangements around the ECA-backed credit financing we should have in place by the mid year.
Jyoti Desai, COO, MTN Group
We looked at the handset ecosystem and revenue opportunity and have identified some of the major cities.
