The new chief executive of Telecom Namibia, Stanley Shanapinda, announced the operator will look to leverage its current footprint and strike network sharing agreements with rivals to tap into new locations in its pursuit of growth in the country.
Shanapinda acknowledged the operator does not own towers and will target rural locations for new connections where customers are most likely to be on a 2G connection. “We are looking at how we can incentivise customers to use faster services,” said Shanapinda, reported New Era.
To support its rural strategy the operator was also exploring network sharing agreements with rivals, in locations where it has no presence.
“They [the Telecom Namibia team] can look at how we can enter into sharing arrangements that we can provide the services to our customers because there is no need for duplicating the (infrastructure) efforts,” said Shanapinda.
Another target for the new CEO is improving customer service, an aspect of operations that had been plagued with customer complaints. Shanapinda said to tackle this issue the operator will be maintaining and upgrading base stations while phasing out 2G and 3G, for 4G infrastructure.
On 5G the chief executive said “there is no question we have to be in the 5G space”, with plans in the pipeline to shape a future rollout. Although he claimed 50% of the operator’s cell sites are 5G ready.
