Glo:Arrived Ghana

1 May 2012

Ghana Gets Glo

Ghana finally has a new cellular operator following the launch on Sunday of Nigerian-owned firm Glo Mobile. Having received its concession back in 2008, Glo Ghana has faced criticism for its repeated failure to launch a commercial service, and only last month it was fined USD200,000 for missing a rollout deadline imposed by the National Communications Authority (NCA). The operator has now switched on its first services, offering coverage to around 85% of Ghana’s population, with 1,400 base stations in 974 cities and 10,000 villages, Adom News reports. Glo claims to have invested USD750 million on its network deployment and is targeting 2,300 base stations in service by the end of this year, which would make it the largest network in Ghana in terms of coverage. It is thought that around 1.5 million people have already reserved Glo numbers.

Glo joins the five existing wireless network operators in Ghana – MTN, Vodafone, Millicom/Tigo, Airtel and Expresso – which between them had more than 20.7 million subscribers at the end of 2011, according to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database.