Zain Kuwait

Company Overview

Zain Kuwait is the largest mobile carrier operating in Kuwait. The company began network operations as Mobile Telephone Company (MTC) launching the country's first GSM services in 1994. By September 2007 MTC had operations on four countries, and elected to rebrand all its operations as Zain. Today Zain Group has a commercial presence in eight countries across the Middle East with over 46 million active customers.

Zain Kuwait provides 2G GSM services over the 900 MHz band, and launched 3G UMTS services in 2007 over the B1 (2100 MHz) band and upgraded the service to HSPA+ in 2009. The company commercially launched 4G LTE services over B3 (1800 MHz) in November 2012. It was expected that Zain would also launch B20 (800 MHz) to provide a LTE-A service, however to date the network has not been activated. The company has demonstrated LTE-A Pro "Gigabit LTE" successfully in January 2016, with a commercial launch expected in the nearby future.

Zain 5G Strategy

The company has been collaborating with both Huawei and Ericsson on 5G testing, with trials conducted in September 2017 achieving over 70 Gbps downlink. Zain announced the launch of its first 5G base stations in June 2018, although details on the technological implementation have not yet been released.