Nigeria’s IHS partners with Visafone

Nigerian telecom infrastructure provider IHS Nigeria and Visafone Communications, a telecommunications operator, have signed a partnership deal that includes the sale and leasing of Visafone’s tower assets, the companies announced in a statement last week.

The new agreement, valued at about $67 billion, will allow Visafone to focus on its core business of providing mobile services, while IHS will consolidate its telecom infrastructure business.

“While it is a smart move for the companies, it is still too early to tell if they can actually build this into something that will generate interest in developing the telecom sector as a whole,” said Jacob Yungan, a Nigerian Ministry of Communications official.

Visafone is the largest CDMA mobile operator in Africa – Code Division Multiple Access – a digital mobile technology that uses spread spectrum techniques. CDMA does not assign a specific frequency to each user, instead every channel uses the full available spectrum.

David Eto