Airtel reveals plans to extend 5G services to other states in 2024
Leading telecommunication services provider, Airtel Nigeria has revealed plans to rollout its 5G services to other states in the country in 2024.
Recall that Airtel launched its 5G services in June 2023 rolling out its services in four states joining MTN Nigeria and Mafab Nigeria Communications Limited who had purchased two available lots of 100 MHz TDD slots of the 3.5 GHz band in 2021. The states Airtel initially rolled out its 5G services are Lagos, Ogun, Abuja and Rivers state.
However, at a media roundtable last week, Airtel Nigeria Director of Marketing, Ismail Adeshina revealed that the network will be expanding its 5G services to more locations next year.
Ismail also expounded on Airtel 5G rollout and the telecom giant’s commitment to innovative service delivery advancement through collaborations.
“Airtel is investing heavily in 5G infrastructure, including towers, base stations, and spectrum licenses, to provide widespread 5G coverage across Nigeria. We are actively collaborating with technology partners, device manufacturers, and local businesses to explore and develop innovative 5G use cases, such as IoT applications and smart city solutions,” he said.
While responding to a concern of one of the journalists who questioned if 4G will be affected following the 5G focus, he said, “Every Airtel site is a 2G, 3G and 4G site. 5G deployment will not affect any of these, especially because the deployment is prioritised based on used cases and the need.”
Also speaking at the event, Director, Airtel Business, Ogo Ofomata, revealed activities that Airtel Business has been up to in terms of providing data and cloud management solutions to both SMEs and government agencies.
“Airtel realised that the buying behavior of the private sector is different from the public sector, so this year, we created a special public sector event to showcase how their various parastatals can be upgraded to become more reliable.
“It was important to showcase to the public sector how their bulky data could be well managed. We had about 46 government agencies represented, to show that we were listening to the needs of the government on the digitisation agenda,” she said.
Airtel Nigeria Director of CSR and Corporate Communications, Femi Adeniran expressed gratitude to the media for participating at the roundtable and declared that the company would look forward to collaborations that will further strengthen the bond between the company and the media.
