In Ethiopia, a monopoly has been formed on all telecommunications services, including fixed-line communications, cellular communications and the Internet. The only telecommunications service provider is Ethio Telecom. For years, the existing monopoly has suppressed innovations and limited the networks expansion in Ethiopia. How did this affect the quality of the Internet? Is it suitable for profitable VoIP traffic termination business?
Not so long ago, the monopolist Ethio Telecom signed a contract with Orange Group, which made it possible to improve the quality of services provided by the company. At the same time, the Internet market development level remained weak compared to other African countries. However, this contract is considered to be Ethiopia’s first step towards the boost of competition.
Over the past few years, a lot of money has been invested in the telecommunications sector of Ethiopia. This has had a positive effect on network expansion and service improvement. Still, remember that telecommunications remain closely monitored by the state. The Ethiopian government controls the mobile and Internet networks and has access to call logs and user's traffic data. In this regard, we recommend using the SBO Traffic Optimization module from GoAntiFraud to hide your activity in the Internet during operation.
Currently, the broadband sector is developing quite actively in Ethiopia. The international bandwidth has been increased and the national fiber infrastructure has been expanded. While earlier the prices for Internet services used to be very high, which did not allow the terminator to make good money at low voip rates to ethiopia, now they are comparable to tariffs in more developed African countries.
As for the average Internet speed, it is 3 Mbps. To work effectively, you need Internet at a minimum speed of 2 Mbps, so this is enough for termination using a small number of channels. In cities, you can connect to a higher speed Internet.
