After years of several failed attempts to resurrect Nigeria’s moribund national telecoms company NITEL, NATCOM Development and Investment Limited (trading as ‘Ntel’), the bid winner for Nitel/MTel (in liquidation) yesterday (Thursday) made its first Voice over LTE call in Lagos.
The test VoLTE call was made at 3.30pm at Ntel’s new Tier III data centre located on Lagos Island. The company explained that VoLTE calls are enabled over a carrier’s high-speed data network instead of on a voice network. Voice over LTE calls also connect faster upon dialling and feature ultra-clear high-definition voice quality.
The VoLTE call was completed in partnership with Original Equipment Manufacturers L M Ericsson of Sweden and Sony Electronics of Japan. This follows Ntel’s first data call on 18 January, 2016 and its first SIP voice call on 18 February, 2016.
NATCOM said Ntel will now progress work with Nigeria’s other mobile operators and international partners to perform cross-network VoLTE calls to ensure that Ntel’s customers can connect with each other as easily as they can to both customers in Nigeria and to those elsewhere in the world: a network now comprising more than seven billion telephones, globally.
This crystal-clear, high-definition VoLTE call was made via an Ntel sim card and is set to be a significant differentiating factor for ntel as it progresses with the roll-out of Nigeria’s largest Advanced 4G/LTE network, due to be launched shortly.
Kamar Abass, Ntel CEO, said: “This is confirmation that the key network elements are now in place to support the full commercial launch of premium integrated voice, video and data services over 4G/LTE.
The Ntel network is built on the 900/1800 Mhz which are the most efficient propagation frequencies for the deployment of 4G/LTE technology.”
