Tunisie Telecom, in collaboration with Ericsson, announced the launch of its NSA (non-standalone) 5G services on Friday. These services leverage TDD spectrum to deliver multi-gigabit speeds to customers. The operator received its 5G licence from the Ministry of Communication Technologies and Digital Economy, along with Orange Tunisie and Ooredoo Tunisia, in late November 2024. The three operators officially launched their 5G networks in mid-February 2025.
Tunisie Telecom’s 5G offering includes both mobile broadband and fixed wireless access (FWA) for residential subscribers. Ericsson revealed that the 5G network is made up of TDD sites using the 3.5 GHz band, alongside FDD sites utilizing refarmed 4G spectrum in the 2100 and 1800 MHz bands.
While all three operators have received 100 MHz of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band, Tunisie Telecom’s TDD deployment is the first to utilize this band, achieving impressive downlink speeds of up to 2.1 Gbps.
Oussama Samet, Central Director of Networks at Tunisie Telecom, highlighted that a major challenge during the deployment was the tight schedule set by the Tunisian Ministry of ICT for launching commercial services. “Thanks to [Ericsson], we were able to meet the challenge of a very tight schedule in a complex environment and ecosystem,” he stated.
