MTN walks away from Ethiopia
10 September 2021
MTN Group has pulled the plug on its attempt to secure an operating licence in Ethiopia as it recorded a major drop in net profit for the first half of the year (H1).
The South Africa-based operator declared it would not participate in the Horn of Africa nation’s latest tender to find a second new entrant, having had its initial bid rejected in May.
Following its initial failure to secure a licence, MTN chief executive officer Ralph Mupita indicated the company would consider another attempt if licence terms were tweaked to include mobile money.
Find out more Egypt helps Libya to rebuild telecoms services
08 September 2021
The government of Egypt is coming to the aid of its neighbour, Libya, by helping to rebuild the telecommunications services due to the damage caused by the country’s civil wars of the past decade.
Amr Talaat, the country’s minister of communications and information technology (ICT), met Faisal Ahmed Qarqab, chairman of the Libyan Telecoms Holding Company, to discuss collaboration, according to media reports.
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Cameroon regulator’s new model to become highly efficient by 2025
08 September 2021
Cameroon’s Telecommunications Regulatory Board (ART) is working on a new regulatory model “to become a robust, innovative and performing institution by 2025”.
The ART indicated that with this fundamental transition, it would be able to optimally contribute to the achievement of president Paul Biya’s ambitions for “the strategic sector of electronic communications” during the current presidential term.
This new regulatory model is being developed in a country that needs to prepare for the integration of the 5G technology, which is 10 to 100
times faster than the 4G, and efficiently anticipate the emergence of new technological innovations.
Undersea mudslide caused continent-wide internet outages
02 July 2021
A new study has found that two subsea cables off west Africa were severely damaged by undersea mudslides, which may have been linked to nearby river flooding.
In January 2020, the south Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT-3/Wasc) cable, linking Africa to Portugal and Spain was hit by a breakdown in Gabon, whilst the West Africa Cable System (WACS) that connects South Africa to the United Kingdom saw an outage off the coast of the DRC Congo.
Later, in March, the WACS cable experienced a further break affecting international bandwidth. Whilst many ISPs suffered extended outage periods, most of the major mobile operators were able to mitigate the impact on internet traffic due to their redundancy measures and were in a position to redirect data traffic to other subsea cable networks.
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