Its no longer news that MTN has both Visafone and has also acquired 800MHz frequency previoulsy owned by Visafone. According to the Leadership, MTN paid a sum of N47.5 billion to buyVisafone’s infrastructures, frequency and over 2 million subscribers. They are planning to launch the 4G/LTE service by July.
MTN has been working on migrating existing Visafone users onto its own network to make the spectrum ready for LTE. Ferdinand Moolman, CEO MTN, confirmed specifically that the company acquired Visafone so as to access the frequency to launch LTE service across the country. At the MTN Group Ltd’s first quarter results analyst conference held in Johannesburg, he said:
It delayed our capital expenditure (CAPEX) rollout during the first quarter a little bit because we needed to realign some of our CAPEX towards the LTE rollout. We started the migration of the subscribers and we hope to conclude that soon. The plans are to have commercial LTE available towards the end of the second quarter, maybe early quarter three, albeit very limited, obviously not substantial, and then start expanding this towards quarter three, quarter four and first quarter of next year. It is obviously a comprehensive project.The mtn 4g lite service will not be readily available nation-wide, only a few selected cities will have access to the service as other areas will have access to enjoy the service as time goes on.