Telecom
How Telcos Cheat, Frustrate Subscribers
Despite increasing customers’ frustration, telecom companies continue to push for more revenue, according to a report published in the Guardian.
Yearly, telecommunication companies in Nigeria generate revenues that surpass their returns in other African countries.
In 2012 alone, the telecoms industry, which is controlled by four major companies – MTN Nigeria Communications Limited, Airtel Networks Limited, Emerging Market Telecommunications Services Limited (Etisalat) and Globacom Limited – generated N1.5 trillion ($9.3 billion) in revenue out of the total N6.7 trillion ($41 billion) generated in Sub Sahara Africa, according to Analysys Mason.
But as the market continues to expand and the companies’ profits climb in Nigeria, there are growing concerns about the quality of service MTN and the others offer and as well as their marketing campaigns, which have left consumers frustrated.
The rise and rise of telecom firms in Nigeria
With a population of about 167 million, demand for telecoms services in Nigeria is the largest in Africa. Nigeria is also in the top 10 of the fastest growing telecom markets in the world.
According to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), as of June 2014 active GSM mobile subscriptions in Nigeria stood at a little over 130 million, representing 98.31 per cent of the market share of the telecoms industry.
MTN leads the market with 58.5 million subscribers, followed by Globacom with 27.3 million; Airtel with 25.3 million; and Etisalat with 19.3 million.
In 2013, MTN generated N775.3 billion in Nigeria against N638.6 billion generated in South Africa, the home country of MTN. The difference represents 21 per cent revenue gain in its Nigerian market.
The company’s turnover in other Africa countries is even far lower than what they make in Nigeria – Ghana (N133.5b); Cameroon (N83.7b); Ivory Coast (N88.5b) and Uganda (N72.4b).
Though similar data for the three other telecoms companies are not available, the growing number of their subscribers both for voice and data service, as captured by NCC, is a reliable indicator of their significant turnover in Nigeria.
As the revenues of these ‘big four’ continue to grow, due to growing numbers of subscribers, the frustrations of mobile phone users in Nigeria also continue to grow.
The problems experienced by users are multiple: dropped calls, failed calls, network interruption, network congestion, failed attempts to load recharge payment, inability to change their tariff plan, inability to activate the offered service, inability to send or receive SMS, unsolicited messages without an option to opt out, and call misdirection to an unintended number, among other difficulties.
In spite of these challenges, GSM operators continue to attract more subscribers to their networks through all manner of promotions, without simultaneously expanding their network capacity.
Many unsatisfied subscribers who have tried to report the problems to their service providers have reported that it is nearly impossible to get through on the busy telephone line provided, and that they are constantly put on hold. Some say their inquiries go unanswered for days. Consequently, most Nigerians are compelled to own more than one mobile phone.
According to a Telecommunications Poll Report by NOIPolls Limited released in November, higher proportion of Nigerians use 2 mobiles phone lines.
Violating consumers’ rights
Many customers have therefore had experiences that have made them feel that they do not get value for money, while the telecom companies’ profits surge.
Some believe that the service constitutes a breach of consumer rights as guaranteed by the Nigerian Communication Act 2003 and the Consumer Protection Council Act, LFN 2004. The law mandates the NCC to promote the provision of a modern, universal, efficient, reliable, affordable and easily accessible communications service.
Section 4 (1b-d) and 104 of the Nigerian Communication Act give telecoms subscribers a right to high-quality service and value for money. Similarly, section 2 of the Consumer Protection Council Act, LFN 2004, and Regulations 2(a-c), 3 and 8 of Quality of Service Regulations 2012 made by NCC emphasised the same rights of telecom subscribers.
Customers are legally protected under the United Nations Guidelines for Consumer Protection, otherwise known as the Consumer Bill of Rights. This legal instrument prescribes a fair settlement of just claims, including compensation for misrepresentation, shoddy goods or unsatisfactory services. This requirement is also found in sections 53, 70, 104, and 106 (3) of the Nigeria Communication Act (2003).
But Nigerian subscribers report that seeking compensation from telecom companies for providing a poor service is a difficult task. As one subscriber puts it: “It is like asking the Sahara desert to bring forth ice-cold water.”
Some subscribers believe that the regulatory system is too weak to come to their rescue. For instance, National Association of Telecommunications Subscribers (NATCOMS), a body representing telecom subscribers in Nigeria, has made several appeals to telecoms firms to work out fair compensatory plans for subscribers. However the body says it is yet to hear back from the telecoms companies.
As a result, NATCOMS has itself decided to take the four telecom companies, including NCC, to court for violation of consumers’ rights.
The group wants N10, 000 worth of airtime to be given to each subscriber for use in 2013, and N15, 000 for subsequent years, until the quality of service improves. NATCOMS lodged the case in court more than a year ago but no conclusion has been reached.
The only compensation paid were the fines ordered by NCC for poor service delivery. Three telecoms firms – MTN, Airtel and Globacom – paid fines of N647 million due to the poor service they provided between July 2013 and January 2014.
For March and April 2012, the ‘big four’ paid another fine of N1.17 billion for failing to meet the standard performance required.
NATCOMS believes that making this payment is an admission on the part of the telecoms companies of their poor performance. But instead of compensating their subscribers directly, the companies paid fines to the regulatory agency, NCC.
The Director of Publicity at NCC, Tony Ojobo, justified the action by saying that the NCC Act does not provide for direct compensation to be paid to subscribers.
NATCOMS president, Chief Deolu Ogunbanjo, takes the opposite view. He argues that the payment of the fines to NCC is a subversion of legal principle that guarantees remedy for a person whose rights are violated.
Customers’ complaints
The Guardian’s investigation shows that customers’ complaints about poor telecoms services are widespread. Customers who spoke to The Guardian also questioned the methods used by telecoms companies to market their products.
Ganiyu lives in the Ikotun area of Lagos, and subscribes to one of the ‘big four’ telecoms companies.
He complained of continued poor reception on his phone.
“You can hardly have a successful conversation without three to four breaks in transmission,” he said. “Sometimes you don’t even hear anything, or the other person does not hear you. Yet the network providers charge for this failed call. And the situation appears to be getting worse by the day.”
Complaints like this one are not only commonplace in Lagos, but have almost become the permanent experience of Nigerian mobile phone users. Operators have consistently blamed the poor state of infrastructure in Nigeria for the bad call quality and unreliable connection.
Subscribers that responded to The Guardian’s investigation also complained about hidden charges passed on to the customer.
Damilola subscribes to one of the four large providers. She told The Guardian that the company signed her up for caller tunes at a rate of N50 per month without her consent.
A second individual, who subscribes to another of the main telecoms providers, said that the company signs its customers up to certain services. James, who lives in Lokoja, Kogi state, said that the company in question charges subscribers N100 for a service “that you did not request for in the first place”. However he said though there is an option to unsubscribe by texting a certain number; this is hardly ever successful.
Caller tunes have inconvenienced other subscribers too. In an account reported by The Guardian recently, subscriber Funmi Owolabi described her experience. “I returned from work on a particular night with an urgent need to call my mother. I had to get airtime to make the important call; unknown to me I was on a caller tune to which I cannot recall when I subscribed.
“I had no cash but the call was important, hence I pleaded with my neighbour to transfer N100 to my line. But my account was cleared a few seconds after it was credited. I felt like weeping when customer care informed me that the account was cleared to pay a monthly subscription for a tune I never ordered.”
Similarly frustrating experiences have prompted many customers to switch providers.
Dumping one network for another seems a reasonable step, yet the experience of many shows that such a move makes little difference. Mr. Bayo Omotubora, Secretary General at NATCOMS, described it as “moving from the frying pan to the fire”, because the ‘big four’ are all “in hot pursuit of undue profit maximization at the expense of quality of service.”
Other subscribers have told of marketing techniques that have left them feeling short-changed or, at best, confused.
Olajumoke described one experience where she loaded credit onto her phone on the understanding that the operator would double her balance at the weekend. “By Monday all my credit was gone without me having used the airtime at all,” Olajumoke told The Guardian. “[The company] said I should have used it all up on the weekend. This they had conveniently forgotten to mention in all their promos. So, I lost all my recharge and the promo extra credits given to me.”
Olajumoke said she lost N19, 000 after she subscribed to a call plan with terms and conditions not been fully explained to her beforehand. Her efforts to get compensation from the company that sold her the call plan were not successful.
In order to verify Olajumoke’s claim, The Guardian’s reporter responded to a promotional message from the same company that offered 1Gb of data for N2000. But when the data was loaded, only 500 Mb of data was registered on the phone.
When The Guardian’s reporter called the company’s customer care unit, he got assurance that his account with the network still showed 1GB, but repeated checks from the customer’s end only showed a credit of 500Mb.
Experiences like these force subscribers to question the way telecoms firms advertise their products and the level of care provided to their customers.
Besides direct marketing, customers are dissatisfied with the deluges of SMS messages and automated calls that have become part of their daily experience. Mr. Bolanle Hassan, a lawyer, described the sending of unsolicited messages by telecoms service providers as “acts of nuisance.”
According to Hassan, he has received unsolicited messages from a particular company for more than a year, despite several efforts to stop them.
Hassan has started the process of seeking redress in court.
The experiences of these customers capture only a fragment of the glitches associated with service delivery by telecoms firms in Nigeria. One subscriber, Solomon, from Lagos, said the problem shows that the regulatory agencies – NCC and Consumer Protection Council (CPC) – “are not pulling their weight appropriately”.
How telecom companies rip off their customers
The Guardian sought to interview staff members of the big four telecoms companies, including customer care centre staff in Lagos and other states in Nigeria’s southwest. Many employees spoke off the record, because they are not authorised to talk to the media.
But former employees, especially the contract staff members, went on record with their comments.
A former staff member, who had worked at one of the providers for more than six years, told The Guardian that most adverts for telecoms products come with conditions. The source said that customers often discovered this only after they had already subscribed. At that point, despite feeling cheated, they cannot hold the company liable for the misleading information.
“Any advert you see in the newspapers bears the clause ‘terms and conditions apply’,” the source said.
“But many subscribers don’t see it because the proviso is printed faintly. Even if they do, not many can figure out the meaning of the legalese.”
The former employee gave an example of how some promotions work. “If you buy any of our mobile devices we promise you a one-year subscription, but the one-year subscription is actually dependent on if you exhaust N1000 subscription every month,” he said. “Which means you must exhaust the N1000 every month before we can give you the bonus for the next month. If you don’t, you may not get it. And if you exhaust it faster, you won’t get another bonus for that month.
“Promotional messages do not provide complete information,” the staffer warned. “And the ‘terms and conditions’ clause is always faintly written at the corner far below.”
He added that companies roll out different plans without giving the detail of the cost implications. He gave a second example of a deal where a company “promises to give you 200 percent bonus of all your recharge. So, when you recharge 200 [Naira] worth of airtime, we give you N400 worth of bonus, which is stored in your bonus account. But the tariff is higher. You won’t see or hear that in the advert message.”
He said that if a company has an ongoing promotion, it might decide to limit the validity of the offer in order to save costs. This can lead to customers losing the airtime they are expecting to benefit from.
“The snag here is when they review this plan, they don’t place advert to inform the subscribers just as they did when they introduced it. So many subscribers would not immediately know of the downward review. Therefore, once a subscriber exhausts his or her bonus, we will be deducting from his or her main credit.”
But as Damilola, another former employee of one of the big companies, noted, customer care centres are rarely notified immediately when there is a product review. When customers discover what has happened, many prefer to unsubscribe, but this is sometimes difficult to accomplish. “I have made three attempts to unsubscribe to Facebook Weekly offered by one the Network providers, all to no avail,” said Busola, a polytechnic lecturer in Ogun State.
Another complaint concerns Value Added Service providers (VAS) that provide applications and additional phone content such as mobile entertainment, caller-tune, ring-back tunes, music download, news breaks, Biblical and inspirational quotes, flight information, telemarketing and others. In Nigeria the VAS subsector provides non-core telecoms services, and is currently worth over $200 million annually. It has the potential to accelerate to a worth of $500 million over the next five years, according to industry statistics.
Though NCC had in 2013 directed all the network operators to disengage unlicensed VAS providers as a way of sanitizing the system. This directive seems to have been ignored because the monitoring exercise carried out in March showed that mobile service providers still have some unauthorized VAS Providers on their networks.
VAS providers are largely responsible for most of the unsolicited messages, said Mr. Osho Saheed, a former contract staff of a telecoms company.
“They are the owner of the application that is used for generating short code messages, and they do not surrender this code to telecoms operators. Therefore the customer service centres cannot unsubscribe customers because they do not have control. We can only refer customers’ complaints to the VAS providers who have control. But they may not want to opt you out for commercial reasons.”
Osho said telecoms firms configure their system in such a way to bring in more revenue for the company, even at the expense of the subscribers.
“For example, if you subscribe for a plan that terminates in 24 hours, you might activate that plan by 11:59pm. At the count of 12am, you lose your money if the airtime is not used up within that one minute. Whereas, people tend to think that the 24 hours begins at the time of your subscription. This is not so. The system is configured in a way that favours telecoms companies at the expense of the subscribers. But it shouldn’t be so.”
Constraints against quality service
Telecoms firms frequently blame a poor quality of service on infrastructural challenges in Nigeria. Unlike other African countries such as South Africa, Egypt and a few others where government have created a relatively enabling environment for the telecoms industry to thrive, Nigeria lacks basic telephone infrastructure.
A senior official at NCC described the infrastructure of NITEL – former Nigerian flagship telecoms company –as ‘analogue’, compared to the new technology being deployed in the industry today.
Similarly, the electricity shortage in the country constitutes a great barrier to the growth of the telecoms industry. While Nigeria can only boast 4,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity supply in 2014, South Africa’s electricity capacity is about 45,700 MW and Egyptian power generation capacities stand at 30,000 MW, according to official figures.
In 2013, MTN Nigeria reportedly spent 12 per cent of its total operating costs on diesel, which amounted to N34 billion. The industry workers The Guardian spoke to maintain that the huge gap in infrastructure is the major reason why service is poor.
According to the Public Relations Manager at Etisalat, Ms Chineze Amanfo, building a telecoms network is capital-intensive, and the telecommunications industry is constantly evolving.
“The Nigerian market is, however, peculiar because operators also have to invest in infrastructure such as power and security, resources which should have been channeled into core telecoms infrastructure and products.”
Because of this challenge, MTN Nigeria, in a statement sent to The Guardian recently, said it has been investing approximately $1.5 billion annually in the last 13 years in order to increase capacity. In spite of this ‘aggressive’ drive for investment, the demand for telecoms services – driven by the sharp decline in tariffs over the last three years – continues to outstrip supply and overwhelms whatever new capacity is created, MTN Nigeria said.
The Public Relations and Protocol Manager of MTN Nigeria, Mr. Funso Aina, explained that the drop in tariffs has been stimulating increasing minutes of usage and activity on the networks by a growing number of people, with a telling effect on the networks.
This situation, Aina noted, is further exacerbated by other underlying environmental challenges. These include short supply of power, vandalism and theft of network infrastructure, insecurity in certain parts of the country, multiple taxation and over-regulation. He said this catalogue of drawbacks leads to interference with critical network infrastructure by unauthorized persons and disruption to services.
The industry challenge highlighted by MTN Nigeria seems to be not unknown even by the regulators. In fact, NCC has often come to the defence of the ‘big four’, to the surprise of subscribers. More than this though – they seem to actively support the telecoms companies in these cases?
The Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Dr. Eugene Juwah, once disclosed that business is not as profitable for the operators as many consumers and stakeholders would like to believe. But with the increasing number of data users, in addition to voice calls, it is unlikely any of the companies will go bankrupt.
In an interview, an NCC spokesperson told The Guardian that:“Telecoms companies are working in an environment that is challenging and this is affecting the quality of service”. He added, “Quality of service would only improve if the environment improves.”
These statements underscore the level of neglect of infrastructural development in Nigeria, and implicitly point an accusing finger at the government, which NCC often nonetheless supports, despite purportedly being independent.
But Mr Ojobo of the NCC was swift to lay the blame at the doorstep of the state governments, which often, he said, prevent the telecoms companies from building infrastructure in their jurisdiction.
According to Ojobo, the issue of right of way is one of the major constraints against the telecoms service providers. He said that many state governors are making it difficult for telecoms operators to put infrastructure in place. “In Abuja for instance, in the last two years, no new base station has been put on ground, the FCT authorities says it is defacing the city. They (network providers) are also having similar challenges in other states of the federation. These are part of the challenge.”
Ojobo added that all lines in Nigeria today are mobile communication, and this puts enormous pressure on the network.
This defense notwithstanding, NCC has, on a number of occasions, sanctioned telecoms firms for not meeting the Key Performance Index (KPI). Fines running to billions of Naira have been paid by the ‘big four’ in the last couple of years (See figure above).
Observers of the industry think that the government should have provided the necessary telephone infrastructure before imposing sanctions on the network providers because of poor service. Alternatively, some reasoned that NCC should have stopped all the networks from further sales of SIM cards, since the network capacity is already strained by excess demand. NCC is not persuaded by this argument.
“We can’t stop them (telecoms firms) from selling SIM cards because it is a liberalised market. It is a demand and supply thing. The demand we have is greater than what the infrastructure can cope with. And to put infrastructure on ground, operators are having challenges because of the restrictive measures introduced by state governments,” Mr. Ojobo explained.
Weak justification
Plausible as this explanation may sound, customers who are forced to experience poor service with no compensation remain unsatisfied.
The Consumer Protection Council (CPC), the agency responsible for the protection of consumers’ rights, has said it is no longer impressed with reasons offered by telecoms service providers for poor service delivery. It says the lack of infrastructure may not have affected the networks as much as companies want subscribers to believe.
Therefore the Council wants the providers instead to make a greater effort to assuage the feelings of their displeased customers.
Recently, the Director General of CPC, Mrs. Dupe Atoki, advised NCC to look beyond the imposition of fines in their efforts to ensure that consumers get value for their money, since the fines that have been given seem not to be producing the expected results.
“The fines are legal… but we want to move this beyond fines to see what we can do to ensure that consumers get value for money,” she said.
“From the consumer side, we say it is not fair because providers are in business and are making profit, and that profit emanates from the resources that consumers put into that business. As long as they are in business, it means it is profitable; as long as no operator has filed for bankruptcy, it means business is good.”
While CPC appears to support what is right for the consumers, it often fails to carry out its duty because of its own limitation, as pointed out by one of its workers, who spoke to The Guardian off record.
First, CPC is just a department under the supervision of the Federal Ministry of Trade and Investment. Its mandate covers various sectors of the economy; but the Council has limited human resources to carry out its multiple functions, one of which is to provide redress to consumers’ complaints. And its inability to effectively discharge this responsibility explains why subscribers do not depend on CPC for redress.
One subscriber, Mr. Hassan, who complained of being harassed with a deluge of unsubscribed messages, said that CPC is in fact the last organisation he would think of approaching to lodge a complaint.
CPC has publicly faulted this attitude of subscribers. The Council blames subscribers for their reluctance to complain against abuse of rights. Therefore, on the last World Consumers’ Day, the Council launched a compendium on the rights of the telecoms consumers with the theme: ‘Fix our phone rights’. In this compendium, it states that the first step to obtaining redress for an aggrieved consumer is to empower the consumers by letting them know their rights.
The NCC spokesperson has also advised subscribers to always seek compensation from their service providers, when they are dissatisfied with the service they receive. He however disagreed with the idea of subscriber groups such as NATCOMS approaching NCC for compensation instead of approaching the telecoms providers, describing such action as taking NCC for granted.
“If your flight to Abuja is cancelled or your flight delayed for four hours, do you demand compensation from Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN)? Or if you go to the bank to ask for your money and the bank did not treat you well, do you go to Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to complain? If you are not given regular supply of power, do you go to Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to ask for compensation? Subscribers should learn to demand their dues from their network providers.”
But subscribers like Mr. Hassan think this advice is unlikely to help them, especially when consumers such as he have had little success approaching their network providers in the past.
“I have complained several times to [the company concerned] to stop sending me unsubscribed messages without any action,” he said.
Way forward
Nonetheless, industry watchers think that the service could improve if NCC prioritised subscribers.
A Senate Committee member on Telecommunication wants NCC to see its duty to Nigerian consumers as its primary duty, than to see it as a service to telecom companies.
“The problem of poor service arose in the first instance because NCC fails in its duty to protect the subscribers,” said Mr. Bayo Omotubora.
Telecoms experts at different conferences on the state of Nigerian telecoms services have suggested that the issue of poor networks can be partly resolved, if NCC gives more license to companies with regional coverage. With many more players in the industry and with effective deployment of broadband, competition would bring greater improvement, they argued.
“The effective deployment of broadband in Nigeria will unleash a new phase of competition in the telecommunications sector… and ensure availability of broadband services at affordable prices,” said the Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Dr. Eugene Juwah.
Customers also believe that telecoms companies can invest in infrastructure to prevent unsolicited messages.
“With N775.3 billion as revenue only in 2013, MTN Nigeria should be able invest in infrastructure that will prevent unsolicited message,” Mr. Omotubora insisted.
Meanwhile CPC and NCC have constituted a joint committee to work out ways to appease consumer concerns in the telecoms sector. In particular, NCC has assured subscribers that new regulations against the sending of unsubscribed messages will be released before the end of the year.
“Though some of those things come from outside the country via the internet, and the internet is not yet controlled or regulated. But we shall find a way around it,” an NCC spokesperson said.
As a way of improving quality of service, MTN Nigeria said that it has outsourced parts of its network to third party specialist vendors, for greater efficiency. It added that the recent decline in quality in particular areas could be attributed to the transition to the new vendors.
“But there will be a sharp improvement very shortly, once the lapse has been bridged,” the company has assured subscribers.
In addition, the MTN Nigeria management said it has reached an agreement in principle with IHS Holding Limited for the transfer of its mobile network towers business, comprising up to 9,151 of MTN’s towers in Nigeria. This transaction will drive network efficiencies and further improve MTN’s voice and data capacity.
NCC has however advised subscribers to be patient with telecoms firms as they continue to strive to get it right. In response, NATCOMS said its members are prepared to be patient, but telecoms companies must be prepared to compensate subscribers while they wait for the service to improve. This compromise may look like a fair deal, but will telecoms companies accept the proposition?
Postscript:
There were five dropped calls during The Guardian reporter’s ten-minute conversation with NCC spokesperson Mr. Ojobo.
There were three dropped calls and one undelivered message during the reporter’s conversation with a source in the Senate Committee on Communication. The source sent the GSM number of the secretary to the Senate Committee Chairman twice before it delivered on the reporter’s phone.
The Guardian’s reporter received more than 300 unsubscribed messages on his three lines within two months of investigating this story.
The chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecoms Operators of Nigeria (ALTON), Mr. Gbenga Adebayo, did not respond to the questions sent to him. Neither did he return The Guardian’s calls.
Gloworld and Airtel did not respond to The Guardian’s request for comment.
Ajibola Amzat produced this report with support from Partners for Democratic Change and from the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. It is part of the Access Nigeria/Sierra Leone Programme funded by the United States Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement.”
By Chris Chinchilla
In 2005, Nokia sold its billionth mobile phone, a budget-friendly device that went to a customer in Nigeria.
By then, the company, based in Espoo, Finland, was making one of every three cellphones globally.
But just nine years later, the mobile-device maker offloaded its entire handset division to Microsoft for pennies on the dollar, compared to what it had been worth at its peak.
Nokia had risen from obscurity in the 1990s to become a worldwide cultural phenomenon by the turn of the millennium, its signature devices featured in TV shows and movies, announcing their presence with instantly recognizable Nokia ringtones.
As Nokia was becoming comfortable in the spotlight, the smartphone era arrived.
And what came next was swift and brutal.
But, as revealed in Nokia internal documents recently made public and interviews with key Nokia engineers from that era, the company saw it coming. Within 24 hours of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’s iPhone unveiling in 2007, Nokia was already weighing its options. They’d immediately recognized the threat. However, outrunning it was another matter.
What follows is Nokia’s story over 14 years, from 1998 to 2012, as the world’s top cellphone maker—how its devices defined their time, how the tech reshaped what phones could be and do, and how the company’s good fortunes in the handset business came to an end.
Nokia Was Once Unbeatable
The centerpiece Nokia devices, the ones that people probably think of when they see the words “Nokia phone,” were the 3210 and its cousin, the 3310. TechRadar has called the 3310 “the greatest phone of all time.”
Released in 1999 and 2000, respectively, the two devices sold more than 280 million units worldwide. Their most innovative hardware feature was the internal antenna—the first mass-market phone without even a stub or retractable aerial. “Consumers had the perception that it could not work well without an external antenna,” said Peter Røpke, a former Nokia senior vice president, in a 2016 interview with Slate.
The phones shipped with games, including the legendary Snake, one of the most popular pre-smartphone mobile games—in which a pixelated serpent eats and grows with every morsel consumed.
Nokia introduced no small portion of the world to texting.
At the time of the 3210 and 3310, the prevailing texting standard was SMS (short message service), which allowed up to 160 characters per message. Nokia appended its own Nokia smart-messaging service to SMS, which allowed the sending of small bitmapped images across an otherwise text-only system. A rich-text messaging system that allowed visual images, audio, and video followed in 2002, leading to a multimedia messaging service (MMS) standard that remains in place today.
Nokia also enabled users to easily create and share ringtones on their devices. By 2000, Nokia’s custom-ringtone
Composer app had popularized a new, short-form musical medium that the ringtone industry, at its peak, would transform into a billion-dollar marketplace in the United States.
A face-on view of the Nokia 1100 feature phone, including a keypad and a black-and-white LCD screen.
Nokia introduced its 1100 phone in 2003 and ultimately sold half a billion units, making it the most popular cellphone in history.
A few years later, Nokia reimagined its mobile handsets, releasing the 1100 in 2003.
The 1100 sold a half a billion units, more than any cellphone in history.
It remains one of the best-selling consumer products ever. Much of the 1100’s success was due to its price tag—in the neighborhood of US $100, making it at the time Nokia’s most affordable device.
Also contributing to the 1100’s popularity were features designed for longevity and tough environments, including dust resistance, nonslip sides for better handling in rainy conditions, and a 400-hour standby battery life.
The 1100 introduced a flashlight as well, which the user turned on and off by holding down the “C” key.
Where most device makers at the time were worried about camera megapixels and color screens, Nokia had leapfrogged its competition with a back-to-basics phone that could survive the rain, endure unreliable power grids, and light the way home.
Apple Launched the iPhone, Nokia Scrambled
On 9 January 2007, at the Macworld conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs made a characteristically bold claim.
“Today, Apple is reinventing the phone,” he said, soon pulling one of the first iPhones out of his pocket.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously launched the iPhone at the Macworld Conference in San Francisco on 9 January 2007.
Nokia held a rapid-response meeting to the event the following day.
Rumors of Apple entering the phone market had swirled since the iPod’s debut in 2001, but nobody had really reckoned with what that might mean.
“Executive summary: Apple iPhone is a serious high-end contender,” read a slide from a Nokia internal meeting held the day after Jobs’s keynote. (That slide is now in the company’s online archives, opened to the public last year.)
“User interface has been a big strength for Nokia,” it continued. “Nokia needs to develop touch [user interface] to fight back.”
Peter Bryer, at the time Nokia’s manager of strategic foresight, was part of that 10 January meeting, and he recalls that Jobs’s announcement wasn’t unexpected.
But the iPhone’s extensive reliance on multitouch—save for a single home button on the front—did surprise the team.
Nokia was already aware of multitouch technology, Bryer notes.
In 2006, the U.S. computer scientist Jeff Han had given a celebrated TED talk about it, demonstrating a multitouch screen, which could sense multiple fingers on the screen at a time, not just one.
Bryer remembers his colleague Timo Partanen, then Nokia’s director of market and competitor analysis, getting excited about Han’s demo.
By the end of the decade, multitouch—in which multiple fingers can interact with a touchscreen at once—would play a key role in smartphones from Apple, HTC, and Palm.
“Timo burst into the room, saying, ‘You’ve got to see this TED video of this guy using multitouch,’” Bryer recalls. “We both thought that was cool and that’s the future. Then I looked at the sponsors of the presenter’s research, and among them were Nokia and Microsoft.”
And yet it took Nokia years to develop a phone that used multitouch.
“Remember, Nokia is based in Finland,” he says. “It’s very cold in Finland. They wear gloves for six months of the year, including the executives. They didn’t think a device like that would work.”
Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says.
“This is yet another competitor launching a great product. But we had no doubt that, if it’s successful, we would do the same. We will launch similar products.”
Two hands hold and interact with a touchscreen phone. The right hand uses a stylus to interface with the device.
In November 2008, Nokia released the 5800 Xpress Music, a year and a half after Apple had launched its iPhone.
That similar product ended up being the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, known as the Tube, released in 2008. “The idea was to focus on streaming videos and television,” Partanen says. “So we made a phone with a similar form factor to the iPhone [that was] optimized for streaming content.”
But the 5800 was “delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed,” he says.
“It didn’t materialize in the way it was planned. It was released as a watered-down version.”
Critics skewered the 5800’s “outdated” feature set and “ancient” S60 operating system, which ran on top of Symbian OS, an open-source mobile platform Nokia had recently acquired. The 5800 sold reasonably well for its time, reaching around 8 million units in its first year alone. But it did not feature multitouch.
“I think that started to be the point when everybody realized that, hey, this is by far more difficult than earlier competitive issues we’ve had,” Partanen says.
Nokia finally released its first device with multitouch in 2010, three years after Jobs’s splashy iPhone announcement and four years after Han’s TED talk demo.
How Android Ate Up the Low-End Market
Nokia had long owned the low end of the cellphone market, with its sturdy, no-frills devices suited for that segment.
So the years immediately following the iPhone’s launch saw the Finnish firm continue to thrive as it kept turning out simple, rugged devices.
As one review of the Nokia 1200—successor to the 1100—put it in October 2007, “This handset chucks away all the fancy features you’ve come to expect on a modern mobile, leaving you with a pared-down feature set that’s easy for tech novices to get their heads around.”
A man behind a wire screen holds up a Nokia phone to a user in the foreground, who looks at the device.
The 1200 kept the 1100’s dust-proofing, flashlight, and long-lasting battery, and added features aimed squarely at the developing world.
The 1200 was the first to include call-time tracking and a multiuser phone book, allowing owners who planned to lend their device to set up call limits based on time or cost.
This feature helped enable what Nokia researchers called kiosks—informal pay-per-call services, in which an enterprising phone subscriber charged neighbors and family members by the minute for use of the device.
In 2006, Nokia studied how Ugandans used their Nokia phones in rural and remote areas.
An internal company slide deck from the time reveals just how keyed-in Nokia was to its lowest-income users. “Village phone operators are often women,” the slide deck notes. “And there tend to be a lot of children around. (Phones need to suffer considerable abuse from chewing, dust, sweat, etc.)
“A unit of phone time is 60 seconds,” another slide states. “But to avoid accidentally going over that time and incurring extra costs, kiosk operators shorten the unit to 57 seconds, allowing a three-second margin of error. Shared mobile used as phone kiosk must show call time.”
Nokia’s familiarity with its market couldn’t protect the company forever, though.
That’s because the iPhone wasn’t Nokia’s only looming smartphone competitor.
In September 2008, the first Android phone went on sale—the HTC Dream, which was also sold as the T-Mobile G1.
While the iPhone was aimed mostly at early adopters and affluent users who could afford to drop hundreds of dollars on a new phone, Android phones were, within a couple of years, aiming at the same low-cost, global user base Nokia was selling to.
“I think it’s fair to say Android is the one that disrupted the market more for Nokia,” Bryer says. “Most of Nokia’s successful devices were not on the high-end market. But then, when Android came along, it started to fill that lower end and eventually took that market away from us.”
A man holds two phones while standing in front of a large poster showing enlarged versions of the two devices.
With two emerging competitors in the low end and high end, the Finnish device maker responded with a device that split the difference—and satisfied neither camp.
Released in 2009, the Nokia 5230 attempted to be a low-priced, touchscreen (though not multitouch) competitor to both the iPhone and Android. It sold an impressive 150 million units, doing especially well in developing countries.
But the 5230 didn’t have Wi-Fi—one of the biggest complaints at the time. In the developing world, Wi-Fi connections were still rare, so the lack of Wi-Fi made some sense. But the rest of the world was not pleased.
“We had such a big gap and dominant position,” Bryer says. “Which does maybe create a level of comfort which you should never get.”
How Nokia Lost the Smartphone Race
By the beginning of the 2010s, Nokia could have still drawn from the company’s labs, which were regularly spinning out new technologies and innovations. However, the Finnish handset maker ultimately failed to turn its R&D into viable new product lines in response to the emerging smartphone threat.
Nokia’s predicament had precedent—Kodak, dominant in film photography, had actually invented the digital camera in 1975 but failed to commercialize it before digital imaging made its core business obsolete.
“The technology coming from our R&D teams was cutting edge,” says Gordon Murray-Smith, director of services and ecosystems intelligence from 2008 to 2011. He recalls attending annual R&D innovation days that showcased work on self-healing materials and flexible screens, long before those technologies were seen elsewhere. “But why was Nokia not able to commercialize some of that really interesting and innovative activity more than it did?”
Nokia desperately needed an injection of life to change its fortunes.
The company’s first non-Finnish CEO, Stephen Elop (a Canadian fresh off a two-year stint on Microsoft’s leadership team), did not mince words.
In an internal memo from February 2011 that was soon leaked to the media, Elop wrote, “The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over two years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.”
In 2011, Nokia released the N9, a smartphone with a Linux-derived operating system. Within a year, Nokia had pivoted toward its Windows Phone-powered line of Lumia devices.
Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9.
The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. “Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,” wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget.
But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of phones the same year—a direct pivot away from MeeGo toward the Windows Phone.
It would be the last major strategic turn Nokia would take as a cellphone manufacturer. From this point forward, a succession of C-suite decisions all but sealed the fate of Nokia’s iconic line of phones.
In 2013, Microsoft announced its bid to acquire Nokia’s handset operations. After the sale went through the following year, it rebranded the division Microsoft Mobile.
But the year after that, Microsoft decided it had made a costly mistake, writing down $7.6 billion—nearly what it paid for Nokia’s handset division—and laying off nearly half of the former Nokia staff it had inherited.
In 2016, Microsoft sold its feature phone assets to HMD Global. The latter still sells Nokia-branded phones—budget-friendly devices as well as nostalgia reproductions of models from Nokia’s glory days.
What remained was a brand name, some intellectual property, and two decades of hard-won lessons about what it takes to stay on top—and what it costs when you can’t.
“When you look at the players in the world of smartphones today, any of those players would struggle ever to achieve 14 consecutive years of being No. 1,” says Murray-Smith.
Partanen says there was a downside to Nokia’s mobile-phone dominance.
“Often, being the first mover is not necessarily the best position,” he says. “Being a quick follower is the best position.”
The company itself ultimately survived, even if the transition wasn’t painless. Nokia’s revenues, which peaked in 2007, fell sharply through the mid-2010s before the company refocused on a decades-old business line—telecom infrastructure—that many had forgotten Nokia was even in. Nokia now ranks among the world’s top three suppliers of 5G network equipment, serving carriers across more than 125 countries, alongside Ericsson and Huawei.
Although the company could never quite crack the smartphone, it now plays a key role in providing the network backbone those smartphones run on.
This piece by Chinchilla was published on IEEE’s website
IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization and a public charity dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity
Telecom
MTN Nigeria Slashes Cost of Broadband Internet Router, Unwraps New Data Bundles for Low-Budget Users
MTN Nigeria has introduced bundled broadband solutions that combine data plans with compatible routers as part of efforts to expand broadband penetration and improve internet access for homes, small businesses and professionals across the country.
The telecommunications company said the initiative is designed to meet the growing demand for reliable, high-speed internet among households, entrepreneurs, students and remote workers while supporting wider broadband adoption in Nigeria.
The new offerings include a 30GB broadband data bundle with a 4G Standard Router for N9,000, a 60GB broadband data bundle with a 4G Premium Router for N14,500, and a Broadband Unlimited Standard Plan with a 5G Router for N40,000.
Egerton Idehen, chief broadband officer at MTN Nigeria, said the company remains committed to expanding access to quality connectivity through innovative and affordable broadband solutions.
“At MTN, we are constantly innovating to ensure that more Nigerians enjoy the benefits of reliable, high-quality connectivity. Broadband has become an essential service for modern living, enabling people to work, learn, create and stay connected,” he said.
According to Idehen, the bundled offerings are designed to make broadband more affordable while empowering individuals, households and businesses with the connectivity required for everyday activities.
He added that the initiative would accelerate digital inclusion and broadband adoption across Nigeria while delivering greater value to customers.
MTN said the solutions build on its Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) portfolio, leveraging its 4G and 5G networks to deliver reliable internet connectivity for homes and small businesses by combining data plans, devices and the company’s nationwide network coverage.
Telecom
Innovation Takes Centre Stage as The Gathering on 100 Pitchathon Rewards Kano’s Young Founders
Young entrepreneurs took centre stage at The Gathering on 100 in Kano as the popular Pitchathon concluded after a three hour competition on Saturday, July 11, at the Meena Event Centre.
Innovator Samiat Damilola Yusuf emerged as the overall winner after competing against 10 startups for a total prize pool of ₦5 million.
The competition showcased innovative business solutions from young founders across technology, fashion, education and the creative economy. This reinforced the growing role of entrepreneurship in solving local challenges and creating economic opportunities.
Over the course of the competition, these 10 founders pitched solutions designed to address everyday problems, with entries assessed on innovation, scalability, market viability and potential impact.
The Pitchathon provided participants with an opportunity to present their businesses before a panel of judges while gaining visibility, feedback and access to valuable networks.
At the end of the competition, Samiat Damilola Yusuf secured the first-place prize of ₦2.5 million for Aplikant, a technology AI powered platform designed to manage applications, track participants, take attendance, and generate impact reports.
Amina Jummai Mayaki, Creative Director of Vogues by Maj, claimed the second-place prize of ₦1.5 million for her fashion brand, while Abdullahi Muhammed Jamil received ₦1 million for Roomie, an application that helps university students find compatible roommates, addressing a common challenge faced by undergraduates across Nigeria.
The quality and diversity of the ideas reflected the growing confidence of Nigeria’s startup ecosystem. According to the 2024/2025 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Global Report, entrepreneurial activity continues to be a major driver of innovation, employment and economic resilience across emerging economies, with young founders playing an increasingly important role in building scalable businesses.
Reflecting on the competition, Abu-Sufyan Aliyu, Senior Manager, Sales, North-East Region, MTN Nigeria, said: “The Gathering on 100 Pitchathon brings young people together with mentors, collaborators, business partners and opportunities that can help move their ideas forward.
Beyond the grants, we want every participant to leave with new knowledge, stronger networks and the confidence to keep building. That’s what it truly means to Live It 100.”
The Kano edition attracted more than 500 Pitchathon applications, reinforcing the competition’s growing reputation as a launchpad for young entrepreneurs.
Following the success of previous editions in Lagos, Aba and Enugu, where winning startups received a combined ₦55 million in seed funding, the initiative continues to connect promising founders with the resources and support needed to scale their ideas.
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