Vodafone and Telecom Egypt sign $600m deal to push 5G

Telecom Egypt and Vodafone Egypt have signed a series of infrastructure service agreements worth $609 million, including deals to prepare the country for the rollout of 5G.

The agreements will enable Vodafone Egypt, the country’s largest mobile operator by market share, to use Telecom Egypt’s extensive infrastructure and fibre optic network.

Amr Talaat, Egypt’s minister of communications and information technology, said the agreements would “serve as the cornerstone for the 5G rollout, enabling both companies to work together to deliver enhanced services to citizens. 

“It is also important to highlight the considerable efforts made in recent years to strengthen mobile network infrastructure,” he said.

In October, Egypt granted mobile operators including Vodafone Egypt, Orange Egypt and e& Egypt licences for 5G services worth $675 million.

5G offers much faster connectivity speeds to individuals and enterprises, allowing for more data-intensive functions on a large scale – but in order to deliver these high speeds 5G requires significant infrastructure investments.

Egypt does not currently have any 5G connectivity, but the country is moving quickly toward implementing it. It has sold licences to operators and doubled the number of mobile towers over the past five years to more than 36,000 towers nationwide. 

Mobile towers are one of the more significant investments required to make 5G work, and while 4G and 3G towers can be repurposed, the higher speeds of 5G are offset by the shorter range of the signal, more towers necessary.

GSMA Intelligence, a mobile phone data and statistics provider, said that mobile connections in Egypt were equivalent to 97 percent of the total population in January 2024. The number of mobile connections in Egypt increased by 4.3 million, or 4.1 percent, between the start of 2023 and the start of 2024.