TE to set up shop abroad by year’s end: State-owned fixed-line monopoly Telecom Egypt is eyeing international expansion and will “provide mobile phone services in a foreign country by the end of 2018,” Reuters quotes CIT Minister Yasser El Kady as having said last Thursday. El Kady did not provide any detail on where TE plans to set up shop. The news comes as TE has been in the market for loans to finance planned expansion and infrastructure development, recently signing two USD 200 mn agreements, one each with Huawei to help roll out its 4G network, and the African Export-Import Bank to reportedly finance the USD 90 mn acquisition of Orascom Telecom’s MENA Cables.

Also this weekend, El Kadi said that mobile network operators would be issued additional frequencies in two months’ time, according to Al Mal. The national telecoms regulator had said last year that it was considering issuing a tender for a “limited set of bands” of additional 4G frequencies after MNOs asked that more bandwidth be made available. The line then was that arranging for additional frequencies would “take some time.”

New data center: This comes as the ICT Ministry gears up to sign an agreement next week with an unnamed international firm to build a state-of-the-art data center in Borg El Arab, El Kadi also said without elaborating.