The tower talks will be initially valid for a three-month period
Saudi mobile operator Mobily entered talks with Saudi Telecom Company that could lead to the creation of a mobile tower joint venture.
“The operators have signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly explore options for extracting value from their respective telecommunications tower portfolios throughout the Kingdom, with the objective of reducing their capital and operating expenditures,” Mobily’s parent company Etisalat said in a stock exchange filing.
Etisalat said that the MoU will be effective for a three-month period and can be extended for consecutive periods of 30 days upon agreement by both companies.
Last month, STC reportedly held talks with both Mobily and Zain regarding the possible combination of their respective cell tower assets into a new, separate entity.
Zain was not mentioned in Mobily’s recent announcement. However, the stock exchange filing said that both Mobility and STC “may also consider involving other licensed operators in the assessment to the extent that their objectives align with those of Mobily and STC.”
In 2015, Mobily said it was considering selling its mobile towers in Saudi Arabia. According to previous press reports, the Telco received offers valuing its towers portfolio at up to $2 billion. Tower operators IHS and American Tower showed interest in Mobily’s infrastructure.
Mobily and STC initially launched 4G LTE in Saudi Arabia in 2011. Mobily currently offers this service through spectrum in the 1800 MHz and 2.6 GHz bands, while STC offers LTE technology through the 1800 MHz and 2.3 GHz bands.
Nokia deploys 4G LTE-A network in Lebanon
Also in the Middle East, Lebanese mobile operator Alfa, which is controlled by Egypt’s Orascom Telecom, has announced the launch of Lebanon’s first commercial 4G LTE-Advanced network in partnership with Finnish vendor Nokia.
The new network will enable Alfa to offer its subscribers significantly higher download speeds of up to 262.5 megabits per second.
The LTE-A network implementation is enabled by carrier aggregation technology, which combines frequencies in order to significantly improve throughput and spectral efficiency. For this implementation, Nokia combined 20 megahertz on the 1800 MHz frequency band with 15 megahertz on the 800 MHz band.
