Wireless Networks

Eaton Towers acquires Airtel’s African infrastructure

African towers firm Eaton Towers has acquired over 3500 telecoms towers from Airtel across 6 African countries.

The firm will then lease the infrastructure back to Airtel on a 10-year contract, while forming agreements to share the passive infrastructure with other service providers, improving cost effiency.

Eaton holds towers in Ghana, South Africa and Uganda, with this new agreement expanding its coverage to 7 African countries with over 5000 towers. The acquisition is a major step towards the scale needed to provide shared telecoms infrastructure solutions, with its customers benefiting from lower operating costs, expanded network coverage and capacity and improved quality of service.

Alan Harper, CEO of Eaton Towers said: “This is a transformational deal which gives Eaton Towers the most diversified tower portfolio across Africa.”

Manoj Kohli, Chairman of Airtel’s selling unit Bharti Airtel International Netherlands BV (BAIN), said: “We are the pioneers and strong proponents of telecoms infrastructure sharing, which results in industry-wide cost efficiencies. The agreement with Eaton Towers is an extension of this philosophy and will lead to far superior utilisation of passive infrastructure and help drive the proliferation of affordable mobile services across Africa.”

The deal will enable Airtel to focus on its core business and customers as well as help it to reduce both its debt and its capital expenditure on passive infrastructure.

 



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