Business
‘No Bailout For Troubled CDMA Operators’
All CDMA operators in the country who cannot operate profitably may have to die naturally as the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) says there is no bailout for them.
Executive Vice Chairman/Chief Executive, Eugene Juwah, says that the issue of bailout for the CDMA sector will not be considered by the regulator because of its technology-neutral policy position.
Based on the technology neutrality model, NCC simply issues the necessary frequency spectrum to enable service rollout, while operators adopt any technology platform of their choice to support the deployment of such services.
This clarification comes in the wake of growing advocacy to check the extinction of that telecoms market segment.
Over the last few years, CDMA operators have made inroads into the mobile telephony market in Nigeria on account of the unification policy embarked upon by NCC. However, they have lately come under intense competition from bigger GSM networks that count bigger subscriber numbers, deeper pocket and wider national market coverage, among other edges.
According to official figures from NCC, at the end of November 2010, total number of active subscriber lines for the GSM sector reached 78.9 million lines representing market share of 91.4 per cent while mobile CDMA sector accounted for 6.2 million representing 7.2 per cent.
The fixed/wireless sector lines finished at 1.1 million (1.2 per cent), during the period when Nigeria grew its teledensity by 61.65 per cent with a total of 157,875, 954 million connected lines across all the networks.
In a similar vein, the ongoing registration of mobile subscribers has also dealt a big blow on the CDMA market where players have had to clear their warehouse of their inventory of non-SIM based handsets at losses to meet regulatory compliance.
The regulator has set a time frame for CDMA operators to ensure that they migrate to SIM-based handsets to enable them capture the biometric and vital information of their subscribers in line with the registration of mobile phone users underway in the Nigerian telecoms market.
While the regulation has sparked off various promos that benefited customers, the already-troubled CDMA market emerged the worse-off recording losses on their handsets.