State-owned Vietnamese operator Viettel has launched 2G and 3G services in Tanzania, where it will trade as Halotel.
The company said it had spent an initial US$736m to deploy 18,000km of optical cable and more than 3,000 base transceivers, enabling it to cover up to 81% of the population in all 26 provinces, including 1,500 newly connected villages.
Halotel will compete with Vodacom, Airtel, Millicom’s Tigo and Zantel, which Etisalat agreed to sell to Millicom earlier this year. The country’s population numbered 49 million as of 2013, according to the World Bank.
Reiterating Viettel’s social commitment to its local markets, group general director Nguyen Manh Hung said the “vision is to provide every Tanzanian with a mobile phone and bring communication and information technology to every corner of life of the country [with a view to] contributing to socioeconomic development.
Viettel’s new investment follows roll-outs in Burundi and Cameroon through Lumitel and Nexttel earlier this year, and in Mozambique through Movitel in 2014.
Elsewhere in Africa, the company bid on Etisalat’s Zantel and Nigerian state-owned fixed-line incumbent Nitel.
The company is also present in Peru, Haiti, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.