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Orange Madagascar is increasing investments in rural infrastructure to bring mobile services to the unconnected half of the Malagasy population. In January, the company signed an agreement with NuRan Wireless to build 500 new telecom sites over ten years.
The telecommunications company Orange Madagascar has signed an agreement with the telecom tower manufacturer Africa Mobile Networks (AMN) to further expand the coverage of its network in rural areas of the country. Both partners intend to deploy at least 500 base stations under the Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model over the next ten years.
The sites that will be built as part of this project will support 2G and 3G. The deployment of the sites has already begun, and some should be operational before the end of 2023, we learn.
This partnership comes about a month after Orange Madagascar signed a similar agreement with the Canadian company NuRAN Wireless to deploy 500 telecom sites on the east coast of Madagascar. These investments are part of the company’s objective of establishing itself as the main provider of digital services in the country.
Investment in rural areas should accelerate the achievement of Orange Madagascar’s ambition, as these areas concentrate a high rate of unconnected people, and therefore potential telecom subscribers. The project should allow the telecom operator to reach more than one million new subscribers. According to the Communication Technology Regulatory Authority (ARTEC), only 46.38% of the Malagasy population has access to mobile services.
The project will also support AMV’s ambition to help expand the mobile network in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa with the deployment of 10,000 towers by 2025. Last November, the company obtained $20 million in funding from Finnfund and BlueOrchard Finance for this purpose.
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