By the close of 2021, the 2G network had covered 99.3% of the Ghanaian population, 3G had covered 97.8% and 4G had covered 90.7% of the population. All 260 districts in Ghana, have been covered with 4G.
These were disclosed by the MTN Ghana, Chief Executive Officer, Mr Selorm Adadevoh, during a virtual Media and Stakeholders’ meeting held on the 20th June, 2022.
He said that the customer’s interaction with the brand was being improved upon through the provision of various digital platforms that would enable the user do a lot more things without the help of a customer service official.
He added that an advanced help-centre had been launched on the MTN website and a virtual assistant known as Zigi had been set up to interact with customers.
Mr Adadevoh reminded customers of the Ayoba app that is free to use. He said that users did not require the use of data when using the app.
He noted that a lot of consumers are on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and MTN was rolling out products that consumers can interact directly with on these platforms.
He said that the company’s fibre optic cables continue to be cut by developers and other people, recounting that in the first 5 months of 2022 alone, 939 of fibre cuts had been recorded. He appealed to the media to help in reducing and stopping this menace.
He said that the company had laid about 8,784km of fibre optic cables with international capacity in excess of 320 gigabytes per second, noting that MTN was investing more to make the fibre optic more reliable.
He pointed out that more cables would have been laid had it not been for the cuts and reminded users that the more advanced the infrastructure, the cheaper it would be for users to access the networks.
Mr Adadevoh announced that one billion US dollars would have been invested by 2025 in infrastructure.
He said that the company’s ambition was to drive digital and financial inclusion to enhance the quality of life of Ghanaians.
According to him, capital expenditure in 2022 had been pegged at 220 million dollars. He indicated that there would be 4G on every site by the close of 2022 and that there were over 15 micro apps in Ayoba to improve customer experience.
As regards SIM registration, he said that 16.5million customers had had their Ghana cards linked as at the end of May, 2022 and 10.2 million had had their bio-data captured.
The company also had 7,000 devices and registration points, as well as teams going to churches, work places etc, to help speed up the registration process.
He said that supporting government’s developmental projects in the areas such as Education, Health and economic empowerment, remained a priority for the company. He enumerated various projects such as ICT centres in schools, libraries, classroom blocks, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, supporting health infrastructure in various hospitals across the country, as examples. He said that over 20million Ghana cedis was being committed to investments in projects in 2022.
He noted that by the close of 2021, a total of 3.1 billion cedis had been paid out as the company’s contribution to national revenue in the form of taxes.
He said that a significant number of jobs had been created through MTN’s initiatives and that the company was also developing and encouraging a local supply chain which would, in turn, translate into more jobs for Ghanaians.