Many African countries have good mobile network coverage in cities but not in rural areas, because operators are unable to economically serve populations of less than 10,000 people due to high mobile tower capex and opex costs.
AMN has developed a cost effective, integrated hardware and service proposition to address the poor mobile phone coverage of rural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa, combining low power BTS transmitters with VSAT satellite technology directing traffic onto an existing network, and using solar panels to power the systems.
AMN has elite partners. Africa’s largest telecom operators, MTN and Orange, have stated that AMN is their rural solution, providing live contracts in the largest target markets.
Facebook has backed the company with total funding of $25m and bespoke proprietary software for determining population densities, while Intelsat has also invested $25m to date and provides access to its satellites with high-performance and ubiquitous African coverage on favourable terms