Ooredoo Maldives

Company Overview

Ooredoo Maldives Plc trading as Ooredoo Maldives, launched its operations in the Maldives on August 01, 2005 as Wataniya Telecom Maldives Private Limited, a subsidiary of National Mobile Telecommunications Company K.S.C.P (“NMTC”). The Company is the second licensee to be issued with a mobile telecommunications service provider license in the Maldives. As part of the rebranding strategy carried out by the Ooredoo Group, the Company changed its name to Ooredoo Maldives Private Limited on December 22, 2013. The Company changed its legal status to that of a public limited company on October 06, 2016 and was accordingly re-registered as Ooredoo Maldives Public Limited Company.

The Company is part of the Ooredoo Group, an international telecommunications service provider with a customer base of over 138 Million spread across 10 countries as at December 31, 2016. The “Ooredoo” brand has been valued at USD 3.1 Billion and recognized amongst the world’s top fifty most valuable telecommunications brand by the leading intangible asset valuation consultancy, Brand Finance, in their “Telecoms 500 2017” report published on February 27, 2017.

Ooredoo Maldives operates standard 2G GSM services over 900 MHz. The company launched its 3G services on the B1 (2100 MHz) band in 2008, and its 4G services on the B7 (2600 MHz) band in 2014. The company began piloting LTE-A in October 2014, and launched the service in January 2017 advertising "4G+" services with up to 100 Mbps peak DL data rates combining B3 (1800 MHz) with B7 (2600 MHz). The company has since refarmed some of its B1 3G spectrum into LTE and also deployed a B8 (900 MHz) service.

Ooredoo partnered with Huawei for its 5G rollout in Maldives. Ooredoo launched commercial 5G services in the Maldives in December 2020 with the initial rollout covering a large percentage of the capital city of Malé. Due to the data rates advertised by Ooredoo it is assumed that a 100 MHz channel is in use, and therefore the service must be using C-Band 3.5 GHz. This requires confirmation.