MTN Nigeria To Launch Commercial 4G LTE Service In July

MTN is set to launch its commercial 4G/LTE service two months from now. After making the acquisition of the 800MHz frequency previoulsy owned by Visafone, Telecommunication giant will launch the 4G LTE in July this year. According to the Leadership, MTN paid a huge amount of N47.5 billion to acquire Visafone’s infrastructures, frequency with over 2 million subscribers.

MTN is already working on migrating existing Visafone users onto its own network to get everything ready for the launching of 4G LTE. The company CEO Ferdinand Moolman, says that the company acquired Visafone so as to access the frequency to launch LTE service across the country. At the MTN Group Ltd’s first quarter results analyst conference held in Johannesburg, he said:

It delayed our capital expenditure (CAPEX) rollout during the first quarter a little bit because we needed to realign some of our CAPEX towards the LTE rollout. We started the migration of the subscribers and we hope to conclude that soon. The plans are to have commercial LTE available towards the end of the second quarter, maybe early quarter three, albeit very limited, obviously not substantial, and then start expanding this towards quarter three, quarter four and first quarter of next year. It is obviously a comprehensive project.

The service will be limited to some parts of the country at the launch only a few selected cities will have access but will be rollout to other cities with time.