Kunle Alade
Thieves have been blamed for the interruption of the services of Nigeria’s telecommunications giant, Airtel.
The equipment of the company stolen affected its operations, leaving to service disruptions, Deepak Srivastava, the Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director of Airtel Nigeria said at the launch of Airtel2good Times in Lagos.
Responding to questions from the media on the alleged poor service being experienced by subscribers, Srivastava posited that his company is faced with challenges of the activities of vandals and thieves who persistently cart away equipment such as fibre cables and generators at base stations across the country.
He said: “In the last 24 months, we have doubled our capacity in a bid to give Nigerians quality service.
“But sadly we are having problems like cutting of fibre cables by vandals and stealing of generators at our base stations.
“We have bought eight generators in the last one month at some particular stations.”
The Airtel boss urged the government to assist in curbing the activities of vandals and thieves by declaring telecoms equipment as critical national infrastructures.
In spite of the challenges, Srivastava assured Nigerians of good quality services at affordable rates.
“At Airtel Nigeria, we are masters of innovation and we delight in changing the rules of the game positively. As true innovators, we always put the customer first in all that we do. I say this because we normally put in a lot of effort and hard work – in terms of painstaking research and in-depth analysis – before we introduce any of our value offerings,” he said.
Speaking further, he said that the company currently has the largest and widest 3.75G network coverage in Nigeria.
“Our 3.75G network is everywhere in the country including the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. It is so because we are committed to realizing our brand vision of becoming the most loved brand in the daily lives of Nigerians.