MTN Cote d’Ivoire is set to boost its rural coverage via a new agreement with NuRAN Wireless.
The US$75 million agreement has an initial five-year term with an automatic renewal option, and will see the Canadian infrastructure firm help MTN deploy up to 1000 sites via a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model. Fees for the NaaS services provided by NuRAN under the agreement are paid on a revenue sharing basis.
The project is expected to support 2G and 3G with variety of site categories to cover different population densities and coverage areas. Similar to previously announced agreements with MTN Sudan and MTN Namibia, NuRAN expects to retain the ownership of the infrastructure after the completion of the contract.
NuRAN CEO Francis Letourneau said that the firm was “pleased to add Ivory Coast to our growing portfolio of African countries and to bring essential mobile connectivity to potentially over 3 million people.”