9mobile Should Tie It’s Love In A Double Knot By Merging The Terrestrial With Space Appeal To Stay Locally Relevant
The Oasis Reporters
October 16, 2024
Events in the last couple of weeks as it affects Nigeria’s robust banking sector is a pointer that the country needs a much more diversified telecommunications services for the world is plugged and highly reliant on the Internet and it’s enabling platforms to thrive in the modern economy operational today.
It is getting clearer that this shift towards technology use will continue for a long time to come.
Nearly all banks had problems with network outages and they were scrambling to solve them to work. From apologies from financial institutions to relief at the problems being solved, clearly indicates that more systems of telecommunications should be in place.
Even the government would be happier to have more networks that are operational because they pay taxes to boost the financial coffers now that the oil industry alone would be struggling to foot the bills of the government as income earners.
The federal government itself has said that it hopes to increase it’s revenue coming from the telecommunications industry by 100% between now and 2027.
Just imagine, MTN Nigeria Communications PLC said it paid N543.9 billion in taxes and levies to the Nigerian government in 2023.
waiting.
Government’s sales of spectrum to telecommunications firms in the country also raises income for a beleaguered revenue base that needs all the cash injections that it can get.
Therefore when LH Telecoms Limited acquired a majority stake in 9Mobile, a then struggling telco in Nigeria, hopes were raised, with the extra hope that they would fix things, but so far, there’s no end in sight for the outage in the firm.
The situation is made worse by 9Mobile’s complete silence. They haven’t communicated with customers about the issue, which only fuels the anger, reports that emanated from places like Zaria last week said their 9Mobile lines have been redundant for a long time.
Unlike in Ibadan anyway. There’s 9Mobile network there. It may be intermittent, but it works.
But generally speaking all over most parts of the country, 9Mobile customers are seriously frustrated because their network has been down for quite some time now.. This outage means they can’t make or receive calls.
Their are challenges generally with the sector, especially at the network that has experienced a decline in infrastructure investment, making the quality of 9Mobile’s network to suffer forcing customers to migrate to competitors. From March 2022 to March 2024, over 1.1 million subscribers ditched 9mobile. MTN Nigeria gained 6.6 million in the same period.
Nigeria’s fourth largest mobile network operator did not add a foot of fiber optic cable to its 4,650km of fibre from 2018 to 2022. Market leader MTN Nigeria has 35,000km of fiber cables deployed.
But there has appeared in the horizon of ever evolving changes in the sector to turn things around and soar to the top. This can make the last to be the first with intrepid savviness.
If 9Mobile can take to the skies, the sky won’t be it’s limit. Agreed that a company like Starlink owned by South African born American citizen, Elon Musk is now a big force to reckon with in global Telecommunications because he read books that added more to his engineering knowledge thus giving him the leverage to flap his wings and soar all over the world with about 6,426 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 6,371 are working, according to Astronomer Jonathan McDowell who tracks the constellation on his website, as of September 2024.
9Mobile may not have the financial muscle to get close to that.
But with about $3,000 or thereabouts, it can launch a cube satellite into space. From one to maybe a few more, it will then save diesel costs for it’s base stations and reach everywhere in Nigeria and beyond.
The network can configure it’s SIM Cards to see the few CubeSats above. Simple. Sort out the regulatory issues in a few quick steps and you are on.
They may get a pleasantly huge surprise if they walk into any Nigerian university with a request to the faculties of Engineering, Computer Science and Physics to quickly design Cube satellites, knowing that the payload is light, and finding out how to launch it above the earth might not be as expensive as believed.
Dare to believe, 9Mobile.
Greg Abolo
gregabolo@gmail.com
