Nigeria: Boost in electronic airtime vending services
Airtime selling vendors are to be introduced in Nigeria to meet the growing demand by mobile phone users in the country.
Source: Highway Africa News Agency
http://highwayafrica.ru.ac.za
About 10,000 point of airtime sales terminals are to be deployed into the Nigerian market by a Nigerian firm, J.D. Kutons Nigeria Limited to promote electronic vending service.
The firm said in a press conference in Lagos on Wednesday that it will be working with major telecommunications firms in the country for the deployment of the PoS terminals which would vend airtime wirelessly all across the country at the first stage..
According to the Chairman of the firm, Mr. Ajibade Oke, the electronic vending service called Everlasting is designed to make it easy for electronic transactions to take place in the country and as a result the system would work with General Packet Radio Service available on the networks of mobile phone operators. He added that besides vending of airtime, Everlasting would add other services including money transfer in the course of the development of solutions for the public.
GPRS is a mobile data service available on GSM networks allowing for various applications including Internet, Multimedia Message Service and Short Message Service.
Ajibade said based on GPRS, the requirement of special connection had been removed and as such airtime vending can be done at every place there as GSM network coverage.
He added that the project has taken over 15 months to conceive due to the detailed work that had gone into it and also required investment of about N2 billion(2 billion Naira) by the time it would be complete.
The firm said it had also entered into a partnership with Globacom for the service because it has GPRS coverage in all the states of the federation and had also signed a partnership with all other GSM firms and other fixed wireless firms.
Speaking at the briefing a representative of Globacom Mr. Benjamin Akinteye, said the project was timely considering the dearth of infrastructure occasioned by the limited number of independent service providers.
He said the move by J.D. Kutons was welcome as it would help increase the ease with which airtime gets into the hands of users throughout the country.
Akinteye added that in order to ensure the success of the scheme, Globacom would be dedicating a link on its network to J.D. Kutons.