Visafone, one of the Unified Access Service licensees, crept into the Nigerian telecoms market last week with a promise to make the kind of impact never experienced in the entire history of the rapid growing Nigerian telecom sector.
The company which unveiled its 3-man team, Mr. Ninan Thomas, MD/CEO, Vinon Shah, Chief Operating Officer and Varadaraja Rao, Chief Technical Officer, to oversee the affairs of the company, at the weekend in Lagos, promised to launch commercial services within the next two months.
For the company, there is a mission to act as a spring board for Nigeria’s economic growth and development. And to achieve this, the company said it would launch and unveil its services with the 3G technology which has become the rave of the moment.
This is much as it has vowed to assist the sector in fast tracking growth and development, through the provision of cutting edge communications infrastructure as well as seamless and efficient services that will ensure excellent customer service, unequaled clarity, the widest coverage and seamless connectivity.
Unveiling his mission, the MD/CEO of the company, Ninan Thomas, said that his investigations showed that the only way to stay ahead in the Nigerian telecom market was to provide the kind of service in which parties in a communication would be able to hear and understand each other clearly, and so having clarity as a key service feature, his company was going to lead the market with apparently little or no competition.
Thomas talks tough. He said that Visafone was not only going to make history as the first telecoms company in Nigeria to launch straight into 3G from the first day of operation, but would capture the subscribers with unbeatable services.
This could actually be possible for the company, on the power of its 800MHz spectrum licence which allows a lot of space for it to play around with innovative technologies. Afterall, 3G is a CDMA based technology.
Thomas also believes that the terrain is not new, having succeeded in similar ventures, in a similar environment like Nigeria. He said he came to Visafone armed with experience and expertise drawn from both finance and telecoms. He started his career at BPL Telecom / Tata in 1989 and later joined Motorola in 1996 as the Engineering Project Leader, winning awards for the best managed project. He later moved on to Motorola Philippines as Programme Manager for a joint venture with Nextel. He returned to India in 2001 to join the executive team that built Reliance Infocom.
Visafone, is a wholly owned Nigerian telecommunications company with Mr. Jim Ovia as founder and promoter. The company received its Unified Access Service licence as a telecom operator from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on August 1, 2007 after being incorporated in Nigeria on June 20, 2007 following its acquisition of Cellcom. Less than two months after its registration, Visafone was announced as the Approved bidder for the 3 carriers in the 800 MHz spectrum put on auction by the NCC.
The company said that in preparation of its imminent launch, it had strategically made acquisitions that can guarantee it a connection of up to 100,000 subscribers and coverage in 40 cities and 13 states including the FCT Abuja, on launch.
