Egypt’s NTRA, Telecom Egypt, and Huawei Complete Africa’s First 6GHz Mobile Services Trial Reaching 1.7 Gbps
CAIRO — The National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) of Egypt, in strategic collaboration with Telecom Egypt and Huawei, has successfully completed the first live trial of mobile communications services using the upper 6 GHz band (U6GHz / 6.425–7.125 GHz) in Africa. The milestone establishes Egypt as the first nation on the continent to validate this advanced high-capacity spectrum for cellular networks.
The technical trial encompassed deploying and activating Africa's first 6 GHz mobile base station and executing a live data call over the spectrum band. Operating over the wide-bandwidth frequencies, the field test achieved peak single-user data downlink throughput of approximately 1.7 Gbps, validating the spectrum's capacity to deliver multi-gigabit speeds and alleviate network congestion across dense urban environments.
The initiative forms a foundational component of Egypt's long-term digital infrastructure strategy and spectrum optimization roadmap, preparing domestic networks for advanced 5G-Advanced and next-generation mobile architectures.
"The 6 GHz band (U6GHz) is one of the strategic frequency ranges included in Egypt's long-term national spectrum plan (2030–2035), currently being finalized by the Authority," Eng. Mohamed Shamroukh, Executive President of the NTRA, said in a statement. "The success of this trial marks a crucial step toward assessing the band's capabilities to support high-capacity mobile services, ensuring the optimal utilization of spectrum as a strategic national asset, and advancing the digital transformation goals of Egypt Vision 2030."
The deployment of the 6 GHz band provides a foundational infrastructure layer for bandwidth-intensive and latency-critical emerging applications, including industrial artificial intelligence (AI), massive Internet of Things (IoT) architectures, cloud computing, and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR).
The successful trial reinforces Egypt's regional positioning as a key digital connectivity hub across the Middle East and Africa (MEA), aligning national spectrum governance with global standards established by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
