Ooredoo Qatar

Company Overview

Oooredoo Qatar (أوريدو‎) is the incumbent mobile network operator and telecommunications company servicing Qatar. The company was founded in 1987 as a telephone exchange company, then known as Qtel (Qatar Telecom). Over the following decades Qtel expanded through the MENA region, consolidating operations and rebranding under the Oooredoo Group banner in February 2013. Ooredoo has been operating mobile services in Qatar since 1993.

The company provides 2G GSM services over the 900 and 1800 MHz bands, and launched 3G UMTS services over the B1 (2100 MHz) and B8 (900 MHz) bands in July 2007. 3G was upgraded to HSPA+ in August 2010 and DC-HSPA+ in late 2010.

4G LTE was launched April 2013 over B7 (2600 MHz) and B20 (800 MHz) bands, which was upgraded to a 225 Mbps LTE-A 2C network in December 2014 using 20 MHz and 10 MHz channel widths respectively. Category 9 3C LTE-Advanced was commercially launched in December 2015, with the addition of a 20 MHz channel in the B3 (1800 MHz) band. Testing was also conducted late 2015 demonstrating a LTE-A Pro 256QAM network achieving 590 Mbps, and later in December 2016 testing exceeded 1 Gbps with the addition of 4X4 MIMO (Cat-16).

LTE-A Pro was commercially launched in March 2017, advertising peak DL rates of up to 800 Mbps.

Ooredoo 5G

5G NR testing began in December 2016 in partnership with Huawei and Nokia, demonstrating peak DL rates of 35.46 Gbps. The company launched the world's first 5G NR network in May 2018 over the n78 (3500 MHz) band. Ooredoo's spectrum licences were officially updated in January 2019 to permit the operation of a 100 MHz channel within the 3500 to 3800 MHz frequency band.