MAP > Internet Providers in Malawi

Malawi has become of the world’s least grown as well as poorest countries worldwide and has been able to suffer from the inconsistent economic development in recent years. Business has been able to endure very high inflation and the rapidly depreciating currency in the year 2015 and the year 2016, though the economy has since then rebounded, with the GDP expected to grow 3.5% in the year 2018 and the current has gone on and stabilized. These factors have also enabled the telecom operators to be able to fund the network upgrades, with the result which considerable investment has been channeled into the fixed line as well as the mobile infrastructure upgrades in the recent years.

The mobile penetration has remained low when compared to the low, and this is about regional average, and therefore there have some considerable opportunities for more development, and in particular in the mobile broadband sector. The TMN become among the debut operator to be able to launch the LTE-A service that was followed by the Airtel Malawi in the year 2018 on January. The market has remained the duopoly between these two major operators, given the failure of the G-mobile as well as Celcom Malawi to be able to launch the service.

But, there has been expectation which Lacell Private, currently working under Smart Mobile brand is going to offer some competition and be able to encourage the reduction at the end user prices. Well, in the bid to be able to encourage the additional competition, the government has been able to introduce the converged licensing regime that does allow two fixed-line operators, the Malawi Telecommunications as well as the Access Communications to be able to enter the mobile market. Converged licensing regime got to be revised and came into the force in September of 2016.

Internet sector has reasonably become very competitive with close to 50 licensed ISPs, though limited availability as well as the high cost of the international bandwidth getting to hold the back growth and kept broadband access prices among highest in this region. The DSL services have been available. The incumbent in late 2017 closed down CDMA network, while WiMAX component was closed down in early 2018. The national fiber backbone almost competes while this country has recently gained some access to the international submarine fiber optic cables via the transit link from the neighboring countries.