Richard Daly and Niraj Singh
By Azmat Haroon
Doha: Up to 80,000 calls are made from Qatar to Asia daily during peak hours through Vodafone network, a company official revealed yesterday.
Vodafone boasts a customer base of one million in Qatar, and a large majority of them use the network for international calls.
“Vodafone UK has some 19 million customers, still they make less international phone calls than our one million customers in Qatar,” Vodafone Business Services Director Niraj Singh told reporters yesterday.
He was speaking at the launch of Vodafone’s Al Safwa Centre, which is located at the Al Fardan Tower in the West Bay area. The centre aims to target high-end business customers but it will be open to all Vodafone customers.
“Over the past three years, we have been working successfully with an ever growing number of companies. Consistently though, there are two things our customers asked us to deliver — innovative products and great customer service. It is this customer feedback that led us to build and, today, launch the Vodafone Al Safwa Centre,” Vodafone’s CEO Richard Daly said.
The Al Safwa Centre features a host of latest Vodafone technologies and products, all of which are available to businesses in Qatar. One such feature is the Machine to Machine (M2M) technology, which enables two-way communications between machines located anywhere in the country without any human intervention. Al Million Taxi is operating on this technology, which allows the company to send nearest taxis to customers.
Singh said Vodafone did not launch Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile broadband network here yet because there were not enough smartphones in the market to run the technology.
“We delayed the launch of LTE on purpose to make sure that the technology is more mature, and affordable devices are available in the market to run it,” Singh said, adding that Vodafone expects to launch LTE services in Qatar by the end of this year.
Locally, after only three full years of operations, Vodafone’s network now provides 100 percent coverage in Qatar. The Peninsula
