Neotel partners with cellular providers
Neotel CEO Ajay Pandey recently announced that his company had partnered with MTN, Vodacom and Cell C to share tower infrastructure to deliver telecoms services to clients. According to Pandey, infrastructure sharing makes sense from both a financial and logistical point of view, and allows providers to rather compete on other aspects such as price, service quality and brand awareness.
High site approvals and acquisitions are also becoming increasingly difficult and infrastructure sharing can alleviate many problems associated with rolling out a wireless network. This makes particular sense in Neotel’s case where consumers are growing increasingly frustrated at not being able to get access to Neotel’s services.
According to Neotel these partnerships only go as far as tower and infrastructure sharing, but the company did not give details about the cost of sharing infrastructure or the terms and conditions of the agreements. It is also understood that while Neotel lays fibre to each of the towers it uses, there is currently no backhaul capacity sharing between Neotel and the cellular providers.
This announcement comes only weeks after the company revealed that it has partnered with MTN – and potentially Vodacom – to build a national long-distance fibre optic network. This network will connect all major centres across South Africa.
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