Republic of Guinea · Licensed, unbuilt
Mai Telecom holds a national operating licence in Guinea for an access network carrying internet, voice and multimedia, together with 30 MHz of contiguous mid-band spectrum and four licensed microwave backhaul links. The network has not been deployed. That is the opportunity.
Thirty contiguous megahertz inside band 41 — the same TDD spectrum on which mid-band 5G is deployed worldwide. Assigned to Mai Telecom by the Direction Nationale des Postes et Télécommunications, nationwide, 24 hours a day.
The assets
None of these can be bought on the open market. Together they are a national network on paper, waiting for capital and equipment.
Licence d'exploitation No 761/DGF/2008, granted by the Ministry of Telecommunications through the Direction Nationale des Postes et Télécommunications. It authorises a public access network across Guinea in the 2 590–2 620 MHz band, for internet, voice over IP and multimedia, without hourly restriction.
Four duplex channel pairs assigned in the 6 GHz band, cleared and paid for in 2009. This is the backhaul that carries traffic from base stations to the core — the piece new entrants usually spend a year negotiating.
The Direction Nationale des Postes et Télécommunications attested in 2009 that code 79 is the property of Mai Telecom. A numbering block of its own is what separates an operator from a reseller: it allows the company to issue and own its subscribers' numbers.
Each height is one link: transmit on the left, receive on the right. Four pairs, from 5.939/6.121 GHz to 6.023/6.275 GHz.
The market
In eighteen months the national fibre backbone went from 50 to 400 gigabits per second, and a second submarine cable is under discussion. Wholesale capacity into the country is no longer the constraint.
What is missing is the last mile. Almost every connection in Guinea is a mobile SIM shared between a household's phones and paid for by the megabyte. Fixed broadband — the connection a business, a school or a clinic actually runs on — barely exists outside a few streets of Conakry. The capacity is at the edge of town and there is nothing to carry it the final kilometre.
Of Guineans used the internet in 2024 — two out of three did not.
Mobile subscriptions by mid-2025, 89% of the population, counted by SIM rather than by person.
National backbone capacity, up from 50 Gb/s in eighteen months.
Population within reach of a 4G signal, against far lower actual use — coverage is not the binding constraint.
Sources: ITU; ARPT Guinea market observatory, mid-2025; SOGEB backbone announcement, 2026.
The thesis
The licence was written for a technology that the industry left behind. The band it sits in went the other way entirely.
In 2008, 2.6 GHz was a niche allocation for wireless broadband. It is now band 41 — one of the principal mid-band TDD allocations for 4G and 5G, supported by every major equipment vendor and by ordinary consumer devices. The world's supply chain moved onto this spectrum, at scale and at falling cost.
Fixed wireless access is no longer the compromise it was. In markets where trenching cannot be justified, it is how households are connected: an outdoor antenna and a router, installed in an afternoon, delivering a usable home connection. The equipment is commodity, and the customer premises hardware costs a fraction of what it did a decade ago.
Contiguity matters more than raw quantity. A single 30 MHz TDD carrier supports a full commercial fixed wireless service without channel aggregation, which keeps both the radio design and the customer equipment simple and cheap.
Four licensed 6 GHz duplex pairs mean the transport layer does not have to be leased or renegotiated. Sites can be linked back to the core on spectrum the company already holds.
A fixed wireless network is built one base station at a time, and each one earns from the day it is lit. Capital is not locked into years of civil works before a single subscriber is billed.
The build
Indicative targets for a single 30 MHz carrier. The site list, capital schedule and financial model sit in the information memorandum.
Phase one · Conakry
Core network, interconnection, and the first base stations covering the districts of Conakry with the highest concentration of businesses and institutions. Backhaul on the assigned 6 GHz pairs.
Phase two · Regional capitals
Coverage extended to the regional capitals along the fibre backbone, where wholesale capacity is already present and no fixed operator is serving businesses.
Phase three · Services
Voice service on the company's own numbering block, and wholesale capacity sold to enterprises, institutions and smaller ISPs from the same infrastructure.
Investors and partners
Mai Telecom is seeking capital and an operating partner to build out the licence. What is on the table is a market-entry position in a country of fourteen million people where fixed broadband is effectively unserved, held by a company that already has the regulatory permissions in hand.
Licence documents, spectrum assignments and the build plan are shared with qualified parties under NDA.
Contact
Investors, operating partners, equipment vendors and regulators — one address.