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Airtel Subscriber Base Exceeds 20 million in Nigeria

By on August 9, 2012

Rajan Swaroop, CEO Airtel

Airtel has announced that its subscriber base has exceeded 20 million people, two years after it was acquired by Bharti from the previous owners of Zain.

CEO of Airtel, Rajan Swaroop, said the company had grown its subscriber base by 31% since 2010, from 14.5 million to over 20 million.

He said, “After two years of operations, Airtel has crossed 20 million customers on its network. Our subscriber base has grown by over 31 per cent.

“We inaugurated our 3.75G network in February, 2012 in 74 towns. We now have over 3,000 3G sites currently providing services to our customers in over 150 towns across Nigeria.”

Swaroop added, “We have doubled our network capacity in the past two years and we are ready for an additional five to 10 million subscribers without any congestion.”

He said the company was still investing in Nigeria, and had already deployed over 535km of fibre in 2011 with a plan to extend this to 2,070km by October this year in alignment with the government’s plan to extend broadband to rural areas.

Speaking on the problems affecting telecommunications operators in the country, he said poor power supply and multiplicity of taxes were the biggest challenges.

“Operators are currently saddled with several demand notices from all manner of agencies working for the various states with threats of closure and arrest appended to them,” he said.

He also disclosed that 80% of the company’s operating expenses is being spent on generators and this amounts to N5 billion monthly.