AMOTEL, WTL rural network now up and running

DAILY NEWS Reporter

WORLD Telecom Labs (WTL) and AMOTEL have announced that the network they have built in rural Tanzania is now live with residents in three remote villages able to make calls and use the internet for the first time.

This innovative project is the inaugural work of AMOTEL, the first licensed Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) in Tanzania. AMOTEL was established last year with a mission to embrace new innovations and developments to serve communities with low or no telecommunication services in rural areas.

The company estimates that the current mobile subscriber base is only 28 million out of Tanzania’s total population of about 50 million. The network provides voice and data to three villages in the Mwanga District of the Kilimanjaro Region.

Each village has a minimum of 1,500 people with average revenue per user (ARPU) of around US$2.5. None of the villages have ever been covered by any kind of telephone network before.

WTL’s award-winning Vivada system (Village Voice and Data) has been installed in each village providing both GSM and wifi networks. Each network has a radius of 12km to cover people living outside the village centres.

The Vivada package includes a micro GSM base station secured onto a newly built tower, wifi routers, backhaul integration, billing software, VoIP switches and an SMS server. The entire system runs on less than 200W.

A cyber café and calling cabin has also been built in each village with residents encouraged to adopt mobile money and other transformative applications. Local engineers have been trained to manage the networks locally.

Professor Robert Mabele, The Board Chairman of Mkulima African Telecom Company Limited, MTC-AMOTEL, said “This is a major milestone both for AMOTEL and for Tanzanians in rural areas who want to be able to use their phones, tablets and computers in the same way as people living in more urban areas.

The people living in these villages are absolutely delighted to finally be able to call their friends and family and to use the Internet whenever they want. I must acknowledge and praise the help and expertise of the WTL team; the quality and reliability of the coverage is exceptional.”

AMOTEL has identified numerous factors that it considers essential for the successful deployment of rural networks by MVNOs, ISPs and other organisations