Following up on claims at the start of last month that Ethiopia was preparing to ink deals with Chinese vendors ZTE Corp and Huawei Technologies with a view to expanding the country’s mobile infrastructure, Reuters reports that the state has inked a USD700 million agreement with Huawei. Under the terms of the agreement it is understood that Huawei will both expand the mobile network belonging to state-owned Ethio Telecom, while it will also look to deploy 4G mobile broadband technology in the Addis Ababa, alongside extending 3G services to more areas of the country. At the signing of the deal, deputy prime minister and minister of communications and technology Debretsion Gebremichael said that the government hopes it will increase mobile subscriber numbers, saying: ‘Although our target is 40 million, now including 3G it [is] 56 million by 2015.’
Meanwhile, the completion of the deal with ZTE is expected sometime this week.
