Indeed if you happened to have called MTN customer care recently, you will no doubt during the course of the interaction have had inquired of you, your familiarity with the new service. And should your answer have been in the negative, you would promptly have been brought up to date on that. In fact to further promote the service, MTN until very recently had been offering free USIM card upgrades to some high-value customers.
The USIM is a more advanced SIM card. It is a 4G compliant SIM to
which customers who want to enjoy the service must upgrade before they can so
do. Indeed until very recently, in a bid to encourage people to do just
this, MTN had been giving away to customers 5GB data free, in their data offer
on SIM upgrade promo. And although preparations are in high gear to extend the
service to other cities soon, the 4G modem itself at N10000, fairly priced is
already available at most MTN Walk in Centres and shops nationwide.
Following on the heels of MTNs 4G LTE launch, soon came Globacom
(currently available in Benin, Jos, Eket, Warri, Zaria and Yola),
better known as Glo and one of the country’s 4 major GSM service providers,
with its own. Not long thereafter, as if not to be caught napping, Etisalat
equally did the same. And so, on this score, if we are to remember that
it was NTEL, successors to NITEL-Nigeria’s perennially underachieving national
phone company, which first threw the gauntlet into the 4G LTE ring (again with
services currently available in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt), then that only
leaves out Airtel as one of the 4 major GSM companies yet to officially launch
its own 4G service.
Nevertheless, as much as this might be said, it can assuredly be
concluded that even they too, will soon launch their own 4G service. How can we
be sure of this? For starters, as far back as April this year, they had
announced the completion of their 4G testing in Lagos, with Abuja and Port
Harcourt to follow.
All this considered therefore, within a short space of time, 2018
ending at the latest, it can be surmised that the 4G LTE service would be
readily available in most parts of the country. So where does that leave the
traditional 4G LTE service providers like Spectranet, Smile and Swift? In a
bind obviously. But to go further and perhaps to be a little more sincere, in a
death trap if they don’t watch their backs.
For one, several things are stacked up against them. The first
and perhaps the most important one is service reach and availability. Granted,
Smile and a few of the other companies mentioned above have over the years
managed to expand beyond Lagos (Swift being the exception), the nominal focal
point for any tech company striving to make inroads into the Nigerian business
environment.
Indeed while Smile is in 8 Nigerian cities (Lagos, Port Harcourt,
Ibadan, Abuja, Benin City, Kaduna, Onitsha and Asaba) and Spectranet,
according to their “About Us” page in 4 (Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan and Port
Harcourt), the GSM companies on the other hand, are present in virtually every
Nigerian town, city and hamlet. Scratch that out- they are within Nigeria,
present everywhere.
And although the 4G LTE technology is not as widespread as the
regular 2G and 3G service of which the GSM companies market penetration is
predominantly composed of (MTN riding on the back of Visafones acquired
infrastructure for instance, may initially apart from the three cities already
mentioned, only be able to offer its services in Ibadan, Kaduna, Sagamu,
Abeokuta), as time goes on and the market for 4G increases, business rationale
will ultimately dictate service spread to other cities and states like Benin,
Enugu, Abia state, etc.
What this means is that with the advantages of scale and reach
that the GSM companies offer and the fact that for many of the potential 4G LTE
customers, having already been a customer to one of the big 4 GSM companies,
chances are they will opt for one of these over the traditional Smile, Swift or
Spectranet option. Take me for example.
While in Lagos I was a faithful follower and user of the Smile 4G
service. In fact, when I once informed a friend of mine, my Smile average
monthly data spend, he jokingly inquired, “Guy, you be ‘Yahoo Boy’?” (Let me
take pains to make it clear here that “I’m not o!”). Anyhow, as I began to have
cause to spend more and more time in Abeokuta rather than Lagos, this became a
serious problem as there is and continues to be no 4G service in the city.
Ultimately after doing the rounds and making several inquiries,
since I already also had a Visafone modem, I decided to settle for Visafones
data service (this too may also change once MTN comes to Abeokuta).
What this means is that Smile has just lost a loyal customer.
What makes that instructive is that once back in Lagos, I may feel no
particular urge to switch back to Smile. Now, imagine this on a scale of
hundreds maybe even thousands for all the Smile or erstwhile 4G LTE companies
(excluding GSM companies) customers scattered across the limited locations to
which these companies services extend.
Obviously in the long run, what these companies stand to lose is
much. If you think this far-fetched, then just think of all the CDMA companies
that you once knew. All the Intecellulars, all the Multilinks, Reltels (Zoom
network), the Starcomms and yes, even the Visafones too - companies that used
to offer voice, data or a combination of both services, in the Nigerian market.
Now ask yourself, where they are now. Exactly. Nowhere to be found.
And if you look at it, really take a calm, analytical appraisal
of the whole situation, then you will realize that the single factor that led
to their demise was the activity of GSM companies in the voice and data space.
They could not compete against the reach of these behemoths whose major claim
to success, beyond service provision, was reach and ubiquity.
In my estimation therefore, Smile, Swift and all the other
erstwhile 4G LTE companies had better sit up, or we may, over the next couple
of years, just be in for another round of Voice/data companies going under.
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