The President of the Association of Telecommunications Companies, Mr Lanre Ajayi, has urged service providers to invest in network expansion to provide quality services.

Ajayi made the call on Tuesday in Lagos in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

He said that increasing investments would result to network expansion and reduce the persistent congestion on some of the networks.

“The current poor service quality is as a result of congestion on the networks so when they expand more traffic will be accommodated.”

Mr Bayo Banjo, a former President of the Nigeria Internet Group (NIG), argued that to ensure good service delivery in the ICT industry, such initiative must start with the regulator.

He said that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) needed an ideological change to tackle anti-competitive practices, discouraging healthy competition in the industry.

Banjo said that healthy competition was the force driving innovation.

The former NIG president noted that poor service delivery was due to a lack of vibrant competition in the industry.

According to him, vibrant competition only comes from newcomers.

“There is an urgent need to encourage small business, all the big ICT companies in America started from the garage; be it Google, Facebook or what have you.

“Government should not involve itself in business but should rather create an enabling environment for communications business to thrive.

“Government should concentrate on its job of regulation and stop anti-competitive practices.

“See, all the small companies are dying, there are no innovations so nothing will move forward.”

Chief Deolu Ogunbanjo, President of the National Association of Telecommunications Subscribers, said that service providers needed to deploy more facilities to support their expansion.

“For example, they can improve on the number of their masts.

“In the UK, there are about 70,000 base stations while in Nigeria, we only have about 25,000.” (NAN)

Update news