Sonatel, Orange’s subsidiary active in Senegal, Mali, Guinea and Guinea Bissau, announced it would commission on February 1, 2016, a global network operation center in Dakar. The facility which will be built in collaboration with other Orange subsidiaries in Cameroon, Central Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, will allow for the pooling of all of Orange’s networks and services platforms in sub-Saharan Africa.

Orange’s GNOC will be built on a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model. In fact, Sonatel and the other Orange subsidiaries will finance the construction of the center, operate it over a defined period of time, and later recover their investment. The facility will later be transferred to one of Orange’s African subsidiaries. Telecom manufacturer Huawei has been selected to build the facility in Dakar, where headquarters will be located, and Abidjan.

Sonatel said that the construction of the GNOC is part of its transformation project called AMEA Network optimization(ANO), aiming to boost competitiveness in the ever-changing telecom sector. ANO’s other objective is to externalize operation of access network which Sonatel said was not ready.