By Nana Appiah Acquaye, Accra, Ghana
Customer network experience is now going to get much better and exciting starting the third quarter of this year as Tigo Ghana rolls out its nationwide construction of new cell sites project to improve quality network coverage. This means subscribers stand a great chance of enjoying quality voice clarity when making or receiving calls, they will be able to download and upload both music and video at a faster pace than ever when using YouTube, and a fantastic experience on whatsapp and other social media networks.
Speaking to Biztechafrica during a field trip to some of the cell sites in Accra, the Chief Technical and Information Officer at Tigo Ghana Mr Ron Reddrick noted the importance of the project to help improve customer experience through the upgrading of some of Tigo Ghana current cell sites and also building new ones to augment the existing ones. “If we have a good cell site, everything will work out right, you’ll get good calls, get faster downloads of your music and videos on YouTube, you can do your whatsapp” he said.
A visit to the Osu One Base Transceiver station and Labadi Beach site revealed a team of engineers from Tigo undertaken upgrade work. According to Reddrick, Tigo is filling gaps in its 3G coverage in both areas and also improving on its 2G coverage capacity to enable customers in the base to enjoy quality call clarity and reliable and fast data connection.
“Tigo teams have been deployed across the country to build multiple cell sites in every week, and these will be integrated into the network, optimized, brought on air, so we get a good network customers experience” he added.
The project which will be under two phases is expected to end by the close of 2016. The first phase which has just began will witness the erecting of 114 cell sites across the country with 17 per cent of the sites in the Greater Accra Region and 30 per cent also in the Ashanti and Western Region.
It is expected that the phase one of the project will end hopefully by the close of September this year. The second phase of the project is scheduled for the first quarter of 2016 where additional 114 cell sites project in Ghana. Currently Tigo operates 1,050 cell sites across the country. Tigo Ghana says it’s investing 24 billion dollars into the project.
