Rwandatel has officially ended its Double Your Credit promotion which started with the relaunch of the mobile network in December last year. Together with cheap phones, the campaign brought in more than 200,000 subscribers.

At the same time, however, the telecommunications company launched a new promotion called Choose your pair aimed at attracting couples especially during the Valentine period. When a customer buys a pair of SIM cards at a cost of Frw 2,000, he chooses a telephone number of his choice and gets the next number in line to give to his Valentine.

According to Patrick Kariningufu, the CEO of Rwandatel, the new promotion targets to add 150,000 customers. As regards Rwandatel coverage, Kariningufu explained that the process of making available the network upcountry is still going on.

The company’s aim is to cover 78% of the territory, reaching the entire population. Currently Rwandatel has 54 operational base stations and the target is to have 224 stations by the end of this year. This will ensure that Rwandatel network fully covers the country.

On the issue of connectivity, Kariningufu said that Rwandatel and MTN are in negotiations to increase their network capacity so as to solve the issue of interconnectivity.

He explained that for every call made by a Rwandatel number to an MTN number, Rwandatel pays half of the charge for the call. Yet due to the fact that MTN has more subscribers than Rwandatel (thus more calls from the latter to the former) and higher MTN tariffs, the bill for interconncetivity is higher for Rwandatel.

“We will continue to pay more, but the situation will improve once we have acquired more subscribers which will increase the company’s market share,” Kariningufu said.

Rwandatel is also working on its roaming service, and is expected to launch the roaming service by the end of this month. So far the company has active roaming services with UTL in Uganda, Safaricom in Kenya and Al Medar in Libya.

However, negotiations are going on with other telecom companies such as Vodacom in Tanzania, Africell in Burundi and Vodacom in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Rwandatel is also involved in the negotiations to offer roaming services to countries that are a destination to many Rwandans. These include China, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom and Dubai. “We target to have 70 roaming active countries by the end of April,” Kariningufu said.