(PRWEB UK) 22 February 2016 -- AMN is pleased to announce a collaboration with Facebook that will accelerate AMN’s mission to connect the unconnected in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. The initiative will focus on leveraging AMN’s innovative commercial and technology solutions to accelerate the rate of progress in connecting the unconnected across Africa and the rest of the developing world. The initiative is designed to achieve the ultimate goal of dramatically reducing the number of people globally that are still today without access to even basic voice and data communication services.
Working closely with licensed mobile operators, and with operations established in Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, DRC and Nigeria, AMN’s ultimate goal is to connect nearly 40 million Africans in more than 10 countries, with nearly 5,000 new base stations.
“We are delighted to be working with Facebook to help enable AMN to achieve its long-term goal of ensuring that any community of any size, no matter how remote, can have access to the same basic communication services as the rest of the world,” said Michael Darcy, CEO of AMN.
“Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected,” said Ashish Kelkar, Director of Infrastructure Strategy at Facebook. “As such, we are very excited about AMN’s rural Africa project, especially their end-to-end approach to maximize efficiency and minimize cost.”
AMN offers a unique and low-risk proposition for mobile operators – to fund, build and operate the rural networks for the operators in return for a share of revenue. The operators have minimal capex and minimal opex risk, enabling them to add incremental revenues and subscribers to their existing networks.
AMN uses innovative technology to deliver initially 2.75G mobile services, including voice, SMS and EDGE packet data, with the ability to upgrade base stations to 3G and then 4G as demand justifies. At the heart of AMN’s solution is a BTS (Base-station Transceiver System) with ultra-low power consumption, which is powered by a compact and highly-reliable solar-based power system. The base stations use satellite-based communication links to connect to the core network of the operator. The combination of the solar power system and the satellite transmission network enables AMN to build new base stations anywhere in Africa, unconstrained by availability of unreliable grid power and terrestrial backbone networks. AMN manages networks of base stations in rural areas with the highest network availability achieved anywhere on the continent – typically better than 99.9%.
AMN is also a founding member of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), an engineering-focused initiative in which operators, infrastructure providers, system integrators, and other technology companies will collaborate on the development of new technologies and reimagine ways of building and deploying telecom network infrastructure. One of the key objectives of TIP is, in the coming decades, to connect billions more people by driving a faster pace of innovation in telecom infrastructure to unlock new opportunities for everyone in the ecosystem.
About AMN
AMN’s mission is to build mobile network base stations serving rural communities in sub-Saharan Africa which have no existing service, providing mobile network operators with a capex-free route to add new subscribers and new revenues and with incremental costs. The vision of AMN is a fully-connected Africa, with no community of any significant size being without basic telecommunications services to deliver social, economic, educational and other benefits to the population.
About Facebook
Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.
Michael Darcy, AMN, http://www.africamobilenetworks.com, +44 1908394482, [email protected]
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