Etisalat Nigeria goes live with commercial services

Etisalat Nigeria, the country's fifth GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) operator, has launched commercial service in seven cities, 19 months after it was granted a Unified Access License by the Nigerian Communications Commission.

The company is able to back its market share with a strong and consistent record of performance achieved by the Etisalat Group over the last 32 years, said vice president of marketing communications Wael Ammar at a ceremony on Thursday.

"This, indeed, enables Etisalat Nigeria to enjoy great synergies in research and development, rapid market entry and competitive pricing," he said. "All of these factors and others, when combined, provide us confidence that we have a highly compelling value proposition that will generate strong demand from our customers and strong performance for our investors and partners."

The company has a network roll-out strategy in place to cover the entire country in phases, Ammar said. After this week's launch in Abuja, Ibadan, Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, Ogbomosho and Port Harcourt, Etisalat Nigeria will move swiftly to the next phase to cover several other cities and enhance coverage.

Etisalat Nigeria is entering the market with the Easy Starter package for prepaid customers, revealed Lucas Dada, the company's head of products and services.

"Easy Starter features the innovative tariff feature called Homezone, which enables subscribers to choose the zone where they spend most of their time in order to enjoy lower call tariffs. Easy Starter also enables subscribers, for the first time ever on a mobile network, to call collect, a feature that enables the receiver to pay for the call," Dada explained.

The operator's pre-launch campaign, 0809UChoose, has already attracted more than 500,000 subscribers, Ammar said. The 0809UChoose campaign offered potential customers the ability to reserve a chosen mobile number on Etisalat's network prior to its launch.

Etisalat's global network serves 74 million customers in 17 countries across Africa, Asia and the Middle East.