MTC Namibia invests N$300 million

Miguel Geraldes, MD of MTC explains that "during December 2007, we commenced and are nearing the completion of a fairly significant investment programme into our network. Once completed by end September 2008, this process will upgrade strategic nodes and reinforcing their central elements in terms of capacity to cope with ever increasing customer numbers and will also cater for future grow, ensuring service reliability and network availability to all our customers."

The larger investments can be summarised by end September 2008 as:

1. The company has multiplied the capacity of its nodes that handle SMSes four times with a single investment to the tune of 3.5 million Namibian dollars. This was in partnership with Intervoice.

2. MTC also launched the deployment of a National Transmission project (Backbone) that will connect the geographic north to the south, the east to the west and the northwest of Namibia with additional local capacities in Windhoek, the Coastal region and the North. This project will ensure that MTC can improve service availability on its own backbone instead of the challenges of dealing with rented circuits from Telecom Namibia. The rented circuits would be used for additional redundancy in the unlikely event of a failure of the MTC Backbone. This project accounts for a global investment of 76 million Namibian dollars which is being shared between Nera and Ericsson.

3. Additional coverage and capacity enhancements on the radio access network - GSM/GPRS/EDGE/3G broadband, to guarantee and improve mobile coverage to the Namibian citizens and visitors with an investment during the same period of around 100 million Namibian dollars. This was a partnership with Nokia Siemens Networks and Motorola.

Trek to the summit

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4. The final strategic investment sealed with contract signature during this month is the overall replacement of our existing central switching equipment installed in Windhoek and Oshakati with a next generation architecture bringing the latest technologies to Namibia increasing by four times the present capacity. This project has a global investment of 88 million Namibian dollars.

"A total investment into the MTC network is aimed at modernisation, improving capacity and reliability to the tune of 267.5 million Namibian dollars that we believe will reach 300 million Namibian dollars this year, demonstrating our commitment to maintaining our market leadership position and commitment to Namibia. Whilst the scale of the present investment is equivalent to our Net Profit, the total invested in our network capacity and coverage will amount to a whopping 1.6 billion Namibian dollars over the past 13 years of the company's existence" Geraldes concluded.