ATCON Celebrates Heroes of Telecom

Emma Okonji

For its game-changing role in the country’s telecommunications landscape, the founder of Globacom, Mr. Mike Adenuga Jnr., alongside other telecoms operators were recently celebrated by the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON).

Adenuga and Globacom were celebrated in the publication chronicling the agents of the revolution that transformed the telecom sector from a 400,000 lines to 162 million lines in a space of 15 years.

At the public presentation of ICT Book, which held in Lagos, the Chairman of the occasion and former Executive Vice Chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Ernest Ndukwe, commended ATCON for documenting history for posterity, while the Minister of Communications, Chief Adebayo Shittu, who was the special guest of honour, lauded the association for the compendium.

According to the publication, since inception, Globacom has been in the vanguard of innovations in the industry, pioneering a long list of innovations, which have not only led to the rapid development of Nigeria’s telecommunications sector, but have also helped to fuel the company’s rapid growth and expansion.

It recalled that Globacom introduced per second billing (PSB) in Nigeria at a time when competitors said it was not possible, adding that PSB made it much easier for Nigerians to get value for money by paying only for the exact time spent on calls.

The book also documented Globacom’s crashing of the cost of GSM SIM and tariff from N20,000 and N50 per minute respectively to as low as N200 and five kobo per second, thus helping to aggressively boost telephone penetration in the country.

Other early revolutionary products pioneered by Globacom in Nigeria included Blackberry, vehicle tracking, mobile internet, mobile banking, multimedia messaging service (MMS), in-flight roaming services, voice SMS, Magic Plus and Text2email, among others.

Globacom, was also chronicled in the book as the first and the only operator so far with a wholly-owned submarine cable, Glo-1, linking Europe and America to West Africa to ensure the availability of bandwidth to enterprise customers in West Africa.

It was the first to launch 4G-LTE network in 33 cities in Nigeria in 2016 and recently scored another first with the creation of a dedicated path in its 4G LTE network for enterprise customers.

Globacom recently upped the ante with the laying of Glo 2, the first submarine cable in Nigeria to terminate outside Lagos with the aim of boosting access to bandwidth in areas outside Lagos, especially the oil platforms and under-served communities in the southern parts of Nigeria.