Airtel has announced an agreement under which IHS will acquire over 1,100 telecoms towers in Zambia and Rwanda under a ten-year renewable contract. The deal will enable IHS to expand its African tower footprint to over 21,000 across five countries. The agreements will allow Airtel to focus on its core business and customers, enable it to reduce debt, and will significantly lower its capital expenditure on passive infrastructure.
For IHS, the acquisition is another major step towards the scale needed to provide shared telecom infrastructure in Africa. IHS customers, the mobile network operators, will benefit from lower operating costs, expanded network coverage and accelerated network roll-out times, higher network capacity and improved quality of service.
