Mr. George Andah, Chief Marketing Officer of MTN Ghana, on Thursday appealed to the over three million subscribers of the company's telephony service to be patient as it worked at optimising the network quality. "We are grateful for the warm reception you gave MTN and for your patience during our challenging period as we optimised our network quality. There is a lot we are doing in this area and we would plead with you to continue to bear with us," he said. Mr. Andah made the appeal when the 14 delegates of the on-going Miss Malaika Pageant paid a courtesy call on the management of MTN at the head office in Accra. As part of the visit, the participants also went on a familiarisation tour of the MTN cell site and customer service office at Osu. Mr. Andah noted that MTN promised to improve network quality, deliver a range of innovative products and services and create a love mark brand in Ghana to make subscribers proud of their association with the MTN brand when it took over from Areeba. He said the network challenges were not a sign of the company's inability to deliver but rather a fall-out effect of ongoing major and landmark improvements to deliver the highest quality network services to subscribers. "As leaders in Africa and the Middle East, we have done it elsewhere and since we came to Ghana we have proved by our marketing drive that we have the financial, technical and technological capacity to deliver on our promise," he said. Mr. Andah said MTN's sponsorship for the Miss Malaika Pageant and other reality shows on TV was a mark of the company's commitment to deliver world-class entertainment on a consistent basis. He said the quality and content of the Miss Malaika pageant was in line with the values of MTN, which included leadership, integrity, innovation, building strong relationship and the can-do spirit. Ms. Mawuena Dumor, Corporate Service Manager of MTN said the company budgeted US$200 million for network improvement for 2007 but had allocated an additional US$35 million to speed up the process to ensure that subscribers received quality services in good time. "The additional US$35 million is intended to bring in additional infrastructure to enhance speech quality and build capacity," she said. MTN took over from Scancom Ghana Limited, operators of Areeba in March last year. Since the takeover subscribers had experience several network problems such as dropped called, poor reception and calls landing in destinations. Source: GNA