A government legislation was
passed in 1992 to allocate the postal and telecommunications activities to separate
institutions and to establish an autonomous telecommunications operator. Subsequently, the
Société des
Télécommunications de Guinée (Sotelgui) was brought into being in 1993 as
the telecommunications operator. Sotelgui was granted basic services monopoly for 10
years; value-added and cellular networks have been opened for competition.
Sotelgui has been privatised in
1995 and the strategic partner is Malaysia Telekom which acquired 60% of Sotelgui equity
while the government retained 40%. As an agreed performance indicator, PSTN must triple by
the year 2000 from 13,000 lines at privatisation date. Sotelgui is the sole provider of
VSAT services. Two earth stations were installed by end-1997 in Fria and N'Zerekore with a
third one is underway at Kankan.
The Direction Nationale
des Postes et des Télécommunications (DNPT) was established in 1997 as a
regulator responsible to the Ministère des Postes et Télécommunications. DNPT
objectives are to ensure the implementation of infrastructure required for a fair
evolution of the telecommunications market.
In addition to Sotelgui,
three other cellular operators are present in Guinea. These are Telecel, Spactel
and Wireless International. The capital city, Conakry, is covered by
all the operators while Sotelgui is expanding in Boke, Kamsar and Sangaredi.
On-going and up-coming
telecommunication projects: they include digitalisation of national transmission
links, rural telephony and local access network expansion. Phase I involves a PDH solution
in modernising national transmission links. The other phases are:
- VHF telephony development in 43
rural areas;
- implementation of 4 digital
switches with a capacity of 100,000 lines for which RFP's are currently being evaluated;
- replacement of all analogue
switches;
- modernisation of the local access
network using underground copper cables;
- extended coverage of Conakry and
the 8 regional areas using copper and optical fibre.
Source: BMI
TechKnowledge Communication Technologies Handbook 1999
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