PIONEER company in Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology ' Qualcom has said that contrary to believe that technology adoption was responsible for the stunted growth in CDMA business in Nigeria, but that factors including lack of fund; poor management and limited network coverage among others.Explaining this, Managing Director, Qualcom, West Africa, Alex Dadson said that CDMA operators in the country had recorded stunted growth in a highly competitive GSM-dominated market, stressing that if the operators that entered Nigeria earlier had taken the initiative of expanding very fast, they wouldn't be facing this present challenge.The present CDMA operators in Nigeria include Visafone; Starcomms Plc; ZoomMobile and the reinvigorated Multilinks.Dadson cautions seriously against the notion that CDMA technology was no longer relevant in global telecoms space, stressing that the technology had never been a challenge in terms of growth.Giving example, he said Verizon, one of the biggest mobile operators in the United States, uses a CDMA technology and it has been largely successful.According to him, with further investment and improved devices features, the CDMA can still compete side by side their GSM counterpacts.He advised that operators in the CDMA market should seek ways of improving their service offerings by ensuring that they invest not only in the best technology, but try as much as possible to be customer focus in their service delivery.Continuing, the Qulacom boss reiterated that the CDMA technology was not in any way a problem to operators, adding that CDMA companies in Nigeria should rather focus more on data provisioning where they had comparative advantage rather than voice.He also said though Qualcom started as a CDMA firm, it had evolved into the GSM space adapting its CDMA technology to others areas of telecoms business.According to him, the CDMA technology had currently been integrated into Glo network while adding that the 3G in GSM world was known as WCDMA in the CDMA technology space.He said, 'We are passionate about CDMA, that's where we started from and we are good at it. So, we work with Visafone, Starcomms, and ZOOM. We assist them whenever they need our support. But we have evolved that technology to also be relevant to Airtel, Etisalat and other GSM networks.'Dadson further said that it was important for the Federal Government to grow the country's teledensity from the current level of 66 per cent to over 100 per cent to boost GDP growth.According to him, every 10 per cent increase in teledensity leads to GDP growth.He said, 'Let's say President Goodluck Jonathan wanted to figure out how can we get the Nigerian economy to grow by one more per cent, the easiest way is to increase the number of people using cell phones.'He explained that once the country's increased the number of people using mobile phones, more people would be able to go beyond talking by creating values through their phones.This, according to him, will have a ripple effect on economic activities, SME growth, agriculture and fishing among others.In view of this, Dadson said though about 600 million Africans now use mobile phones, he however, noted that there was the need to ensure the remaining 400 million Africans also had access to basic telecommunication.'It is important that the one billion Africans come on to the mobile telecommunication platform because nobody should be left out of the mobile communication revolution,' he said.
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