4th gateway for Malawi amidst congestion problem

Zain subscribers in Malawi have been complaining of poor quality network ever since Celtel changed to Zain.

But during the commissioning ceremony of the media gateway network, which is a tower that acts as a translation unit between different telecommunications systems, the company's chief executive officer for Africa, Chris Gabriel who was in attendance, acknowledged terrible congestion Zain subscribers in Malawi are experiencing.

“We are facing great pressure on our network due to overwhelming subscriber boom,” conceded Gabriel. “These will soon be history once our experts complete the current upgrading exercise which is in phases,” he assured.

Zain Malawi had been running notices in newspapers and radios informing its customers that the problem was due to network expansion project and capacity optimisation.

The company said this resulted in periodic network interruptions for the past couple of weeks by subscribers and is expected to continue in the next four weeks.

Gabriel said their engineering experts from Ericsson in Sweden, Nokia and Siemens networks in Germany and NEC in Japan are working round the clock installing cutting edge technology that will offer much better network, products and services.

The work, the company said has resulted in congestion especially from 6-8pm in some parts and the new hardware currently being installed will reduce congestion.

“We are making every effort to minimise these interruptions as we upgrade the network,” he said.

The newly commissioned media gateway will improve delivery of Zain's international call services for both ‘One Network' as well as roaming, according to the Zain Africa boss.