Telecom operators yesterday faulted the comments of the Group Chief Executive Officer, Guaranty Trust Holding Company (GTCO), Segun Agbaje, over the use of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) technology and high data cost in the country.
They believe the banker merely read a prepared speech which he had no opportunity of going through before reading out to members of the public. Agbaje had, among others, said: “All of you who use fewer data, or mobile banking, which is more advanced, which is easier to use, you need to get the cost of data down in Nigeria, the cost of data, compared to India, really we are being exploited.”
Acting under the aegis of the Association of Licensed Telecoms Operators of Nigeria (ALLTON), they challenged Agabje to name the successor technology to USSD which is used all over the world to execute a string of commands riding on telecoms infrastructure.
Chairman of the group, Gbenga Adebayo, in a telephone interview, said much as Agbaje is a respected banker, he believes he read from a prepared speech because there is no basis for him to say data cost is high in Nigeria and suggests that USSD is an obsolete technology.
