Vodacom invests in new solar-powered sites across SA
06 October 2021
Vodacom, one of South Africa’s big four telcos, has invested R8m ($564K) in the installation of new solar-powered sites as part of its energy and carbon management strategy and commitment to reducing its impact on the environment.
These three sites in Polokwane, Vereeniging and Bloemfontein are in addition to a solar project installed at a base station controller site in Randburg, Gauteng in May last year. They will form part of the company’s 1,088 solar-powered sites across all of Vodacom’s markets.
Find out more Telecom Egypt picks Juniper and pens Sudatel connectivity deal
18 June 2021
Telecom Egypt has selected UK-headquartered Juniper Networks to upgrade and deploy a network capacity expansion across its national infrastructure, serving a customer base of 9.8m for fixed-line services, 6.9m for broadband and 7.3m for mobile.
The operator has embarked on a network upgrade strategy designed to add more capacity and flexibility through automation while staying in line with the Egyptian government’s Digital Egypt and ICT 2030 initiatives. The network will be equipped with 400G interfaces from Juniper’s purpose-built IP transport portfolio using custom silicon to meet the growing bandwidth capacity requirements in Egypt, the company said.
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Musk’s Starlink ‘in advanced talks’ for Nigerian licence
18 June 2021
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is in discussions with the NCC in order to obtain operating licences for its low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation Starlink.
Discussions appear to have progressed significantly, with SpaceX’s Starlink market access director for Africa, Ryan Goodnight, meeting NCC representatives in person recently to discuss the matter further.
Find out more Egyptian regulator sanctions telecom operators
18 June 2021
Egypt’s telecom regulator sanctioned five major operators a total of E£20.65m or US$1.3m, for breaching the mobile number portability regulations.
The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) fined the incumbent operator Telecom Egypt E£3.9m, Etisalat Misr E£3.95m, Orange Egypt E£5.8m and Vodafone Egypt E£7m.
NTRA said the violations “were mainly related to the unjustified rejection of MNP requests, the unavailability of response to MNP requests within 24 hours from the date of investigation, or the non-activation of the number on the operator’s network after MNP”.
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