Orange Tunisia, Ooredoo Tunisia and Tunisie Telecom all launched their respective 5G mobile services late last week, less than three months after receiving their 5G licenses.
Orange Tunisia, which launched its service on Friday, is offering both mobile 5G service and a fixed wireless access router with Wi-Fi 6 and a “Turbo option” for gamers and streaming users.
Orange Tunisia also said it currently has 400 5G sites operational in several regions, and is working to expand coverage to all governorates.
The operator has also launched a 5G Lab near its Orange Digital Center in the Berges du Lac district of Tunis that showcases demonstrations of potential enterprise 5G use cases such as Industry 4.0, health and education.
Ooredoo Tunisia also introduced an FWA 5G offering called “Fix Jdid 5G” for homes and offices as part of its 5G launch, promising data speeds of up to 100 Mbps.
Ooredoo Tunisia CEO Mansoor Rashid Al-Khater said in a Facebook video announcing its 5G launch on Thursday that the arrival of 5G “not only means higher speeds or a shorter response time, it is the key to a more competitive digital economy, and a more connected and advanced society.”
Meanwhile, at its 5G launch on Friday, Tunisie Telecom highlighted the advantage of its extensive fibre deployments backing its 5G network. According to state newspaper La Presse, Tunisie Telecom CEO Lassaâd Ben Dhiab said the telco has deployed over 61,000 km of optical fibre across the country, to which 90% of its 4G base stations are connected. Ben Dhiab said that infrastructure will provide a “solid basis” for its 5G deployment.
He added that Tunisie Telecom’s 4G network now sports “almost 100% coverage in urban areas and 99.8% in more remote areas, while increasing connection speed in these regions,” the report added.
Tunisie Telecom, Orange Tunisie and Ooredoo Tunisia received their 5G licences from the Ministry of Communication Technologies and Digital Economy at the end of November 2024 after submitting their applications for the licences in September. Each 15-year licence comes with 5 MHz of duplexed spectrum in the 700-MHz band, and 100 MHz of TDD spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band for 5G usage. The ministry has also set aside three 20 MHz blocks that will be made available at the request of operators. Other 5G frequency bands are set to be released in later phases.
