MTC’s weekend promotion sparks commotion

MTC’s ‘Tango Weekend Special’ campaign this past weekend, which was also supposed to test the mobile operator’s network capacity, proved a thorn in the flesh for its more than one million subscribers when people making use of the offer jammed the network for hours.

Under the promotion, pre-paid Tango customers could pay N$10 and then make unlimited ‘free’ calls subscribers and 100 ‘free’ SMSes per day to other MTC on Saturday and Sunday.According to MTC spokesman Albertus Aochamub, ‘the intention was not to deliberately clog the network but to reward MTC customers and to simultaneously test the recent improvements we have made in the recent months’.’We needed to ascertain the capacity of the network after the upgrade and to identify the bottlenecks. Unfortunately we could only do the test over a weekend such as this.’MTC recently invested N$300 million in upgrading its network infrastructure.’We are glad to inform that our technical people have now identified the areas that need attention and no efforts will be spared to improve call and SMS success rates on the MTC network,’ Aochamub said.’In saying that, MTC would like to sincerely apologise for the network congestion that was experienced over the weekend. We assure our customers our continued commitment to provide them with the best mobile service,’ said Aochamub.Aochamub said 184 000 customers signed up for the campaign. More than 32 million SMSes were sent over the weekend, and 10,5 million and 11,1 million call minutes were recorded on Saturday and Sunday respectively. The Namibian received hundreds of SMSes yesterday complaining about the inconvenience caused by the promotion.MTC last week announced a 13 per cent increase in revenue to N$1,257 billion for the 2007-2008 financial year, with profits amounting to N$627 million.nangula@namibian.com.na