Posted by Everest Amaefule, Abuja on
From April 1, subscribers on the Nigerian Mobile Telecommunications Limited network can share the credit on their mobile phones with their friends, relatives and acquaintances.
From April 1, subscribers on the Nigerian Mobile Telecommunications Limited network can share the credit on their mobile phones with their friends, relatives and acquaintances.
Courtesy of a new software which was developed by the technical team of the mobile company, subscribers can transfer some credit from one mobile phone to another. The implementation of the new service will begin at the end of the month.
The new service was presented to the press in Abuja on Wednesday, by M-Tel staff led the Managing Director, Mr. Edwin Momife, the Chief Marketing Officer, Prince Apampa and the Deputy General Manager, Corporate Communications, Mr. Umar Abdulhamid.
The new product, called Share de talk, is a value-added service that offers prepaid subscribers on M-Tel network, the opportunity of transferring credit from their cell phones to other phones within the network.
The minimum credit that could be transferred at a time is N300 while the maximum is N1000. However, the number of transactions could be repeated as many times as required. A subscriber is charged N20 for each transfer of credit.
A short message service is sent to both sender and receiver that a certain amount of money has been transferred and received.
Momife said the new product eliminates the risk associated with physical handling of scratch cards and the time, risk and money expended in dictating scratch card numbers to beneficiaries.
'Our gathering here marks a watershed in the history of consumer product development in the GSM paradigm in Nigeria. Today's event is yet another in the series of M-Tel innovative product packages for the highly sophisticated GSM consumers.
'The story has often been told that most benefactors who attempted to dictate credit numbers to friends ended up losing such credits to smart crooks.
'The simple logic is such that while attempting to dictate the scratch card number to the beneficiaries, the smart crook eavesdrops on the information, punch the numbers as they are mentioned direct to the phone and connect as fast as possible.
'Losing credit through such means is a common thing in our environment. In M-Tel we try to be very proactive and responsive to issues of consumers concern.
'The new product is highly interactive and entails taking a part of the credit balance on the benefactor's line and dispatching it to the beneficiary's line via an SMS command," Apampa explained.
To transfer credit, a subscriber is required to select the SMS menu on the phone. On the menu they are required to enter the phone number of the beneficiary followed by a *, the amount being transferred and then sent to the number, 7979.
The Punch, Thursday, March 17, 2005