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Saturday, May 17, 2014
Tigo gets behind small business
Babati District Commissioner , Khalid Mandia (c) cuts a ribbon to inaugurate Tigo’s new customer service shop launched in Babati, Manyara recently. Right is Tigo’s Contact Centre Operations Manager Ms. Halima Nassoro and Tigo’s Customer Service Centre Supervisor for the Northern Zone Ms. Lydia Sakaya (left).
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania – Tigo Tanzania, one of the leading mobile phone operators in Tanzania has created a ‘Tigo Business’ unit to develop a series of products using high speed fibre connections.
The Tigo Business unit was designed to support the needs of the country’s large corporate organizations as well as its small and medium sized enterprises.
Tigo said it is also exploring the potential for deploying cable services to consumers in relevant urban areas and expects a pilot service to be underway later in 2014.
Tigo’s General Manager Diego Gutierrez told East African Business Week in Dar es Salaam last week, “I am delighted that we now have this Unit to drive forward our fibre offer to Tanzanian businesses.”
“Just as we have been innovating in our core mobile service for many years, we are now taking the next step by creating a high-speed opportunity that can help transform companies’ performance and support growth in the local economy,” he said.
Tigo has created that unit to develop a series of products using high-speed fibre connections to support the needs of the country’s large corporate organizations as well as its small and medium-sized enterprises.
According to the manager, the newly-established team plans to launch these new services from the third quarter of 2014 by deploying Tigo’s existing fibre network and expanding it.
He said local and international businesses will be able to benefit from Tigo’s own extensive fibre infrastructure, which supports its mobile network, and on which there is considerable capacity to support the high-speed connectivity now required by so many Tanzanian companies.
Tigo is part of the international telecommunications and media company Millicom, many of whose other operations offer such business-to-business services.
In Tanzania, the fibre deployment is within the company’s overall investment plans.
The mobile phone company which started operations in 1994 as the first cellular network in the country, now covers 30 regions in mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar.
Besides voices, the mobile phone operator offers high speed internet access as well as mobile financial services through Tigo Pesa.
It is part of Millicom which provides affordable, widely accessible and readily available cellular telephone services to more than 50 million customers in 13 emerging markets in Africa and Latin America.
By Leonard Magomba, Saturday, May 17th, 2014