7th October, 2014
Lanre Ajayi, President, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), said on Tuesday that the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) and the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks might soon cease to exist.
Ajayi, made the assertion in an interview with NAN in Lagos. He spoke against the backdrop of the dwindling CDMA networks in the country and the need to resuscitate them.
According to him, CDMA and GSM are both dynamic technologies. “Both GSM and CDMA are changing. In fact, very soon, there won’t be anything like CDMA. Very soon, there won’t be anything like GSM; so, I don’t think we should worry about it.
“Both of them incidentally are evolving into a new technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE), hence, very soon, both technologies are going to merge into called LTE,” he said.
The ATCON president said the technology that a service-provider used was no longer important, noting that, what was important was the business model which the operator was using.
“What is important is the scale of a service provider; are they operating on a large scale or on a small scale?
“So, those are the important things because both technologies may not even exist any longer,” he said.
Mr Gbenga Adebayo, the Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), told NAN that the CDMA network in the country had the challenge of competition posed by the GSM operators.
He said the CDMA operators were faced with the problem of inability to access the capital required to compete with the GSM operators.
According to him, the CDMA network is not able to catch up with the applications and features of the GSM.
“There is nothing wrong with the CDMA network because even in America, a large part of its national network is running under that technology.
“So, what should be done is for the players to consider being regional operators; I think that is the way around for them,” he said.
NAN reports that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in September declared 13 CDMA networks inactive.
The NCC said that only two of the operators — Visafone and Multi-Links — were active as others could no longer operate after massive loss of customers to the more competitive operators in the industry.