There’s been another service upgrade announcement from state-owned incumbent Ethio Telecom, presumably aiming to position itself as an attractive alternative to new entrant Safaricom Ethiopia in what has become a much more competitive Ethiopian market in recent months.
Ethio has officially launched four services that, it says, will significantly enhance the customer experience.
One such is VoLTE (voice over long-term evolution), a service that the GSMA describes as ‘a digital packet voice service delivered over IP via an LTE access network’ and Ethio Telecom is promoting as providing ultra-high definition call quality, with much less background noise. The tariff for the service will be similar to the existing normal voice tariff with no subscription fee required to start using the service.
The company has also launched rich communication service (RCS) / rich business messaging (RBM), enabling individuals and institutions to send and receive a variety of real-time communications, including graphics/photos, video information, emojis, audio clips and messages, as well as share locations.
Another launch is multimedia messaging service (MMS), well-known in many countries already, which allows customers to send and receive video and audio files, send multiple messages to different recipients simultaneously and send/receive messages of up to 1600 characters, and enables users to know the time the message has been received and read.
Finally there are what seems to be upgraded voice mail services (VMS), allowing users to record and deliver voice messages to recipients, and store and retrieve messages at any time and any place.
With attempts to attract a third operator apparently abandoned Ethiopia remains, for the moment, a telecoms duopoly, albeit Ethio Telecom is way ahead on subscriber numbers. Safaricom Ethiopia is still making good progress, however, and there’s a lot of the market still to play for, as Ethio’s new services launch indicates. Next year should be an interesting one for mobile telecoms in this country.
