22nd June, 2014
President of the National Association of Telecommunications Subscribers (NATCOMS), Chief Deolu Ogunbanjo, on Sunday urged the providers of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) to improve their services.
Ogunbanjo told NAN in Lagos that the troubled CDMA sector had failed its subscribers.
He said that in recent years, the sector had been struggling to survive the competition in the GSM-dominated market.
CDMA providers include Multilinks, Intercelullar, Visafone, MTS and Starcomms.
The NATCOMS chief blamed the failure of the CDMA primarily on the business model rather than the technology.
Ogunbanjo said the Nigerian Communications Commission should assist the CDMA operators to enable them to provide better services.
“For some years now, CDMA operators have been at a disadvantage in competing with other telecommunication companies due to low capitalisation.
“Poor promotion of CDMA technology, subscribers’ preference for GSM telephones and corporate governance issues have also seen the fortunes of the operators falling,” he said.
Ogunbanjo urged the operators to concentrate more on providing data service rather than both the data and voice services.
“The CDMA is more or less mobile data services and the operators should improve on it rather than combining both the data and voice services,” he said.
Ogunbanjo said the big operators in the industry should be made to concentrate on the voice segment.