Orange Group and its Senegalese subsidiary Sonatel have opened the Orange 5G Lab Dakar, the group’s first such facility on the African continent for the testing and development of fifth-generation products and services. Benefitting from the experience and opportunities created by the existing network of 13 Orange 5G Labs in Europe, the new site housed at the Orange Digital Centre in the Senegalese capital will enable local companies to discover more about the technology, develop use cases, and test new products and services on an experimental 5G network.
Orange Senegal staged the country’s first 5G test in Dakar in November 2020 in partnership with Chinese hardware vendor Huawei. A second test achieving data speeds of up to 2Gbps, this time in collaboration with Nokia, was carried out in the commune of Saly in the Thies region in December 2021.