Unitel S.A. is a private

Angola Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a country on the west-Central Africa, central coast of Southern Africa. It is the second-largest Portuguese-speaking world, Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) country in both total area and List of c ...

mobile phone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...

company which was established on 8 March 2001 as a joint-stock company. The company is owned by the Angolan state, having been nationalised in 2022.

Operations and location

The seat of the company is

Luanda Luanda ( ) is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Angola, largest city of Angola. It is Angola's primary port, and its major industrial, cultural and urban centre. Located on Angola's northern Atlantic coast, Luanda is Ang ...

. It has about 2.000 employees and a network coverage nearly in all the provincial municipalities since 2002. Unitel sells its services via a network of shops; recharging cards for pre-paid contracts are also sold by individual street sellers all over Angola. Prepaid cards can also be recharged via the Multicaixa network of ATM's. Unitel claims to have 9 million customers out of a population of estimated 18 to 20 million people.

Network

Unitel operates a network based on

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...

and

UMTS The Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) is a 3G mobile cellular system for networks based on the GSM standard. UMTS uses Wideband Code Division Multiple Access, wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA) radio access technolog ...

standards, and provides voice communications, text (SMS) and multimedia (MMS) messages, and mobile internet access. Contracts are available as post-paid and pre-paid. Since December 2011, Unitel covers all Angolan municipalities, by installing a transmitter in Rivungo, Kuando Kubango province; a station which is operated by solar power.

Tariff

The tariff is calculated in UTT (Unidade Tarifária de Telecomunicações - Telecommunication Tariff Units), a common tariff unit used by all telecommunication companies in Angola. The price of one UTT was 10 Kwanzas in 2016. Recharging cards are available with 125 UTT, 375 UTT, 625 UTT and 1250 UTT for 900 Kwanzas respectively 2700 Kwanzas etc. Post-paid contracts can also be paid by bank transfer or direct debit from a bank account. The Unitel phone numbers begin with 92, 93 and 94.

Ownership and nationalisation

The company was previously owned by Oi and Helios (through Africatel), Angolan state-owned oil company

Sonangol Group Sonangol () is a Government-owned corporation, parastatal that formerly oversaw petroleum and natural gas production in Angola. The group consisted of Sonangol E.P. () and its many subsidiaries. The subsidiaries generally had Sonangol E.P. ...

and local firms like Geni holding (through Mercury), and Vidatel owned by

Isabel dos Santos Isabel Kukanova dos Santos (; born 20 April 1973) is an Angolan businesswoman, the eldest child of Angola's former President José Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled the country from 1979 to 2017. As early as 2013 ''Forbes'' described how dos Santo ...

, each holding 25% of Unitel. In October 2022, Angolan President

João Lourenço João Manuel Gonçalves Lourenço (born 5 March 1954) is an Angolan politician who is currently serving as the third president of Angola since 26 September 2017. Previously, he was the minister of defence from 2014 to 2017. In September 2018, ...

issued a decision finalising the nationalising of Unitel, ending the links of

, the daughter of Angolan longtime ex-president, with the operator.

References

External links