Zambians fail to communicate on New Year's Day

By Brenda Zulu

Many Zambian Celtel subscribers failed to communicate to anyone on the 2008 New year's day. This failure was also extended to MTN and Zamtel subscribers who wanted to communicate with people on the Celtel Network.

Emelda Yumbe Coordinator of the Zambia Media Women Association(ZAMWA) said that she failed to communicate Celtel subscribers. Yumbe who is an MTN and Zamtel subscriber said she failed to communicate with people on the Celtel Newtork.

Shalom Investments in Mandevu who are retailers of Celtel Mobile Top Up White Nyerenda complained that he had lost business on New Years Day indicating that the money was trapped in the Mobile Top Up facility which was not operational on Christmas day.

He said many of his customers were annoyed because they were unable to top up and make phone calls.

Sally Chiwama a Celtel subscriber said she was very disappointed and upset because failure to communicate was not happening for the first time.She called on celtel to improve the services.

Mary Sathula a Celtel subscriber asked Celtel to be considerate especially during times such as the New years even when many people are known to have been using their facility. "Celtel should be considerate and they should improve their services," said Sathula.

Charles Kachabe another Celtel subscriber said he was very inconvenienced as he really needed to communicate and that this led to failure of some urgent business. He called on Celtel to apologies to the Celtel subscribers as they were robbed of a precious moment to even wish their friends an families a Happy New Year!

Meanwhile, Celtel management has apologized to it’s subscribers for network interruption during the festival season that resulted into clients failing to generated calls and short messages (SMS).

Celtel acting public relations manager Patricia Litiya said in a statement in Lusaka yesterday, the network interruption was as a result of micro-link failure in Mbabala area in Choma District on December 31. 2007 and was rectified on January 1, 2008

Ms Litiya said engineers could not access the site due to heavy rain hence the delay in resolving the problem and that areas affected by the micro-link failure were the entire Southern and Western Province.

She indicated that in Lusaka, Celtel experienced equipment failure on one of its switches and this affected the network performance in Lusaka, Eastern and Central Provinces. The effects could still be felt in some parts of the country until late in the evening of January 1, 2008.

Litiya said Celtel Zambia did not everything possible to ensure network availability and that capacity was adequate to cater for expected traffic during the festival season.
She said generally calls and SMSs were sustained until January 1 when they experienced the equipment failure.