Etisalat sets West Africa roaming

Etisalat Carrier and Wholesale Services today announced an agreement to provide access to its international roaming network to Atlantique Telecom's West African operations.

Initially, Atlantique's operations in Niger and the Ivory Coast will be able to offer their customers the benefits of hundreds roaming agreements, covering all manner of voice, data and value added services before being extended to Benin, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Togo and The Central Africa Republic.

Abdul Aziz Al Muttawa, Chief Executive Officer at Atlantique Telecom said: "Etisalat's strength and its investment in infrastructure, especially international connectivity and roaming partnerships provides great support to our operations in emerging Africa. We are delighted to be able to benefit from this and to share this with our customers. By offering such a wide variety of roaming services, we are supporting our customers in their travels and we are also able to plan for the roll out of other value added services in the future."

Ali Amiri, Executive Vice President, Carrier Wholesale said: "We are pleased to welcome Atlantique Telecom as the latest customer of our Roaming Replicator service. This has proven extremely popular with the region's telecommunications community and is today helping operators across the Middle East, Africa and Asia to provide high quality and global roaming coverage."

Etisalat's Roaming Replicator allows client mobile operators to mirror etisalat UAE's extensive roaming services to over 510 destinations which enable users to make and receive calls in addition to covering BlackBerry services, 3.5G services, Push Mail, SMS, Voice, MMS and other voice and data services.

Etisalat is the largest carrier of voice traffic in the Middle East, terminating calls at over 600 destinations, with 118 direct connections and Points of Presence in the UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, New York, Frankfurt and Amsterdam.

Etisalat owns am 82% stake in Atlantique Telecom, which operates under the Moov brand. Moov operators can be found in Benin, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Niger, Ivory Coast and Togo.