Nigerian GSM Coverage Reaching Remote Cities

interWAVE has continued its expansion in Africa by working with Commercial Facilitators Limited (CFL), a value-added telecom service provider in Nigeria. For the initial phase of the deployment, interWAVE has secured an order of approximately US$3 million for the provision of a GSM network supporting approximately 7,000 subscribers. The network will cover remote cities of Nigeria and include local switching. A majority of the order has been and is expected to be delivered in the quarters ended June 30 and September 30, 2003.

"CFL is excited by interWAVE's ability to provide solutions well suited to the market in Nigeria," commented Niyi Oyedele, chief executive officer of CFL. "We see this as the perfect vehicle to efficiently address strategic applications such as semi-permanent coverage, radio extensions over satellite and distributed switching clusters. interWAVE's solution lends itself perfectly to remote areas with little or no transmission facilities. The flexibility of the solution also allows switching the majority of the traffic locally, which reduces backhaul requirements and associated costs. The wireless market in Nigeria is poised for exponential growth, and CFL is pleased to work with interWAVE to capitalize on that growth and establish itself as the true leading service provider in Nigeria."

interWAVE's compact Mobile Switching Center (MSC) capability offers localized switching. By placing a switch close to the community, interWAVE's GSM solution eliminates the need to backhaul local calls to a centralized location, therefore reducing transmission costs and resulting in significant bandwidth savings on the connection path. interWAVE will work on the deployment in conjunction with it's local partner, Private Networks Nigeria (PNN), a local provider of telecom services, thus establishing a strong local presence able to address future growth.

The Nigerian market represents a population of over 120 million with an estimated teledensity of 0.66%. Prior to the arrival of GSM services in Nigeria there were 600,000 active telephone lines available to the Nigerian public, with 30,000 of those lines being analogue cellular phones. Since their debut almost two years ago, GSM operators have provided over a million lines to the teeming Nigerian population. It is expected that GSM will improve the national average teledensity by a factor of 15 with the anticipated deployment of 12 million phones over the next 5 years."

Posted to the site on 6th August 2003