Country profile: Benin
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A lot has happened in Beninese telecoms in recent years. Isocel Telecom plans to expand its fixed network to service half a million customers, having focused on rolling out service to customers in densely populated areas in the first instance – including with fixed wireless access, which currently accounts for a tenth of the company’s subscribers.
As Isocel’s CEO Robert Aouad told ITW Africa in 2024, this development is building on recent liberalisation of the Beninese market, allowing FTTH players to make use of a national backbone network, which has recently been expanded and complemented with a new network in the west of the country. Benin’s subsea connectivity plays an important role in these improvements in connectivity, with the Maroc Telecom West Africa cable an important addition in 2021.
On the wireless side, MTN Benin launched the country’s first commercial 5G network in November 2024, alongside a similar rollout in Congo-Brazzaville. This is in addition to several roaming agreements, such as a Ghana-Benin tie up in April 2024 that Togo was added to in October of that year.
There is room to expand on the data centre side, though. Few Beninese companies using cloud-based services at all, and those that do tend to go for international options – only government resources and certain e-government apps make use of local hosting.
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