The Ministry of Telecommunications, Information Technologies and Social Communication (MINTTICS) asked the operator for explanations UNITEL about the constant failures in the communications service that users have experienced, especially on cell phones. The operator says it is aware of the failures, and clarifies that they result from the lack of increased capacity on the network.
To MINTTICS, UNITEL said that it is focused on resolving these problems and justified that the delay in implementing solutions was due to the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, in the years 2020 and 2021, with regard to the supply of equipment.
The administrator of UNITEL, Amílcar Safeca, said, in statements to Televisão Pública de Angola (TPA), that the operator has been working since October last year on recovering the increase in network capacity with the installation of equipment, the well-known antennas.
According to this person, this first wave of antenna installations took place from October 2022 to May this year, which made it possible to recover part of the services.
The administrator understands that it is not enough to cover all the needs that UNITEL has.
According to this UNITEL administrator, the problems began in April and May 2022, but were resolved in October of that year.
“We had a period of stability until April this year and we experienced disturbances again, essentially last August”, he said.
According to Amílcar Safeca, what concerns UNITEL and customers now are the so-called disturbances on cell phones.
“Sometimes calls get lost or noise appears on the line. Sometimes the call doesn’t even go through,” she explained, assuring that the problem is being resolved.
As for equipment to increase network capacity, in a second phase, the UNITEL administrator said that they will begin to be installed this month and will continue until next December.
Amílcar Safeca said that in the last four years, UNITEL invested around 800 million dollars in improving network communications.
