Commercial banks in Nigeria are owing telecommunications companies over N17 billion following the Nigerian Communications Commission’s suspension of its Determination on Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) Pricing last year. This disclosure was made by the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Prof. Umar Garba Danbatta at a virtual forum organised by the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) held on Thursday. In furtherance of its mandate to protect the interests of consumers and support a robust telecommunications sector, the NCC recently announced that it had revised the Determination on the USSD. But speaking at the ATCON’s virtual…
Author: DigitalTimesNG
There are reports that MTN Group is planning to sell part or all of its $243 million interest in Jumia Technologies AG. This is part of the telco’s effort to raise funds to pay down debt and enter new frontiers. A Bloomberg News report said MTN would be taking advantage of the fact that Jumia’s shares have gained about 142% so far in 2020, recovering from its record lows in 2019. However, private sources told Bloomberg News that no decision about the sale has been reached yet. Jumia, Africa’s largest online retailer, is operational in 14 African countries including Nigeria. Jumia Technologies…
Airtel Africa Plc and Telkom Kenya Ltd have agreed to discontinue the completion of their merger plans due to the lengthy process of the transaction which has been on since February 2019. The two telecom firms resolved not to complete the business combination despite their respective efforts to reach a successful closure and having it drag on for a while. The discontinuation disclosure was made in a notification sent on Wednesday, August 5, 2020, to the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) by Airtel Africa and signed by its Group Company Secretary, Simon O’Hara. A subsidiary of Airtel Africa Plc, Airtel Networks…
Global internet outages saw an unprecedented rise during the pandemic, ThousandEyes has revealed, causing disruption for employees working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to ThousandEyes, outages increased by a staggering 63% between January and March and remained elevated through the first half of 2020, with June seeing a 44% surge in disruptions, according to a report in ITPro. Cloud and internet service providers (ISPs) were found to be the hardest hit, experiencing significant increases in network outages between January and July 2020. During that period, cloud providers experienced an estimated 400 outages globally, compared to over 4,500 in ISP networks. When examining total outages,…
Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Airtel Nigeria, Segun Ogunsanya, has expressed profound appreciation to Nigerians for their unflinching support for and loyalty to the Airtel network as it marks its 10th anniversary. Ogunsanya also announced that Airtel Nigeria, as part of activities marking a decade of doing successful business in Nigeria, would be spending N300m to support the fight against COVID-19, being the final part of the N1.9b the mobile telecommunications company pledged last April at the early stages of the pandemic. He explained that N200m would be invested in refurbishing and equipping a 4-storey admission facility for…
A former Director-General of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Professor Tony Iredia has said that Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, must leave the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) to do its job. Iredia said this on Wednesday while speaking on Sunrise Daily, a flagship programme on Channels Television. The veteran broadcaster, who was also former Director General of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), emphasized that Alhaji Lai Mohammed is not a regulator and should allow the NBC do its job while he plays a supervisory role. He pointed out that the minister taking over the role of the broadcast regulator creates…
Fiam WiFi, one of Nigeria’s newest telecommunication companies, is set to provide affordable internet services for all, via hotspots, with deep concentration to high density lower income areas and rural communities. Fiam WiFi was licensed by the Nigerian Communications Commission in 2018 after meeting the basic requirements. Experts believe technology advancements over the last five years have made deploying and maintaining public Wi-Fi networks easier and less expensive than mobile and LTE operators’ networks. But Akin Marinho, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Fiam WiFi, said in a statement made available to DigitalTimesNG that the emerging telecoms giant is equipped…
Like the biblical declaration of St. Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith; from now on, the crown of righteousness is laid up for me..,” Sonny Aragba-Akpore, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)’s Head of Media Management and Public Relations was on Thursday in Abuja, hosted to a Valedictory party that turned into a day of honour and encomiums by the Management and Staff of the Commission. Aragba-Akpore, a former Information and Communications Technology/News editor at the Guardian Newspaper, joined the service of the Commission in 2014. At the valedictory party…
The contribution of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector to the Country’s Gross Domestic Product, (GDP) has increased by almost one per cent in the first quarter of the year. Malam Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, Director General of the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA ), disclosed this while delivering his remarks at the international webinar meeting organized by the Information Technology (Industry) Association Nigeria (ITAN) Kano and Abuja Chapters on Tuesday. He noted that despite the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic on all economies of the world, the country’s ICT grew by 14 per cent compared to growth of…
Ericsson has been selected by SoftBank Corp. to deliver cloud-native 5G Core for SoftBank’s 5G Standalone Network. The solution, which includes Ericsson Cloud Packet Core, Ericsson Cloud Unified Data Management and Policy, as well as Ericsson NFVI, will play a key role in SoftBank’s operational transformation. The zero-touch operation, including continuous delivery and integration processes (CI/CD), is made possible through container-based microservice architecture and its automation capabilities. Ericsson’s dual-mode 5G Core provides SoftBank with capabilities that enable the development of new 5G use cases for mobile broadband users, as well as for enterprises and industry partners. Ericsson and SoftBank have been continuously collaborating in…