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Kasapa Rebranding To Expresso Telecom

Kasapa Telecom is rebranding to Expresso Telecom, two years after Hutchison Whampoa Group, its previous owners sold its interest to Expresso Telecom Limited, the Dubai Investment of Sudan’s Sudatel Telecom Group.

This is the second time Kasapa is re-branding. Kasapa, which was established in 1996 as Celltel re-branded to Kasapa in 2003. Kasapa currently has an estimated 400,000 subscribers, the least of all five operating mobile telecom operators in Ghana. Expresso has done an upgrade of Kasapa’s CDMA network to EVDO. This is expected to increase the network quality and bring faster data access to costumers.

Expresso has started running radio, tv and print media ads of its data service CliQ. CliQ offers EVDO USB modems at attractive and competitive rates. A CliQ EVDO USB modems sells at GHC 60 with 4.5GB data. Same price as MTN & Zain’s 3G modems but with 2GB and 500MB more data respectively.

Expresso Telecom already operates in Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and Nigeria. Checking from the offers available to Expresso subscribers in Senegal, I expect Expresso Ghana to be a vibrant player in the a mobile telecommunication market which is seeing keen competition. Kasapa had the lowest call rate of 0.0925p/minute within network till Vodafone & Zain (Airtel Ghana) slashed their call rates to 8p/minute across all networks. I would want to see how Expresso will react to this.

I owned a Kasapa phone back in 2008. I gave it up because the service was terrible. I was getting charged for checking my voicemail, something which was advertised as free. In my opinion, the limiting factor to Kasapa’s growth is it being a CDMA network. There are a few CDMA handsets available here. The Ghanaian consumer wants to be able change SIMs and switch phones whenever. I just hope Expresso does their homework well and put out more classy CDMA phone on the market. I wouldn’t minding trying Kasapa again if I could get a Palm Pre or Pixi or an Android phone.

There is a lot of excitement in Ghana’s telecom sector now; Zain is also re-branding to Bharti Airtel, Glo mobile & the Glo-1 cable are going live soon, the MainOne cable is live and a price war is looming.

Welcome Expresso! Let’s see how you can ‘transform peoples lives to help unlock their potential through advances in a digital world’.

Evolution of Expresso Ghana