MTN Nigeria, the country’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, has begun the migration of more than two million Visafone CDMA subscribers to its own GSM platform, as it prepares to roll out 4G LTE services. Local newspaper The Guardian cites an unnamed company official as saying that the move will enable MTN to make use of Visafone’s 800MHz spectrum to deploy a 4G network, adding that the affected customers would be migrated within the next two months. ‘Visafone still remains an entity in the sense that even when the customers move platform, we retain their identity which is their current phone numbers and the products and services which have been approved for Visafone,’ the company official explained.
As previously reported by CommsUpdate, MTN Group completed the process of acquiring Lagos-based Visafone, which was formed in June 2007 by Nigerian businessman Jim Ovia, at the start of this year, after the transaction was approved by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).