VICTORIA, Seychelles — Airtel Seychelles has switched on its commercial 5G service in a launch that pairs the new network with a content partnership with the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation (SBC), the operator said on Friday at a press event held at Airtel House on Île Perseverance.
The rollout positions Airtel as the second mobile operator in Seychelles to offer 5G, following Cable and Wireless Seychelles, which introduced a 5G network on Mahé in 2020 through a partnership with Huawei. Cable and Wireless continues to operate the only fully separate 5G network in the country.
Speaking at the launch, Airtel Seychelles Managing Director Eddy Kapuku framed the move as a question of access rather than firsts. “Our 5G launch is not about putting a badge on a map; it is about being the first to make 5G truly work for the Seychellois pocket and the Seychellois home,” he said, according to the 4 July 2026 edition of Seychelles Nation.
The package unveiled at the event includes 5G mobile plans and a 5G Home Wi-Fi service. Airtel says subscribers will be able to reach speeds of up to 500 Mbps on compatible handsets and home routers, and will receive complimentary access to SBC television content as part of the bundled experience. The arrangement also allows Airtel customers to subscribe to DStv packages delivered over the same connection, the company said.
The SBC collaboration is the more unusual element of the announcement. The broadcaster’s chief executive, Jude Valmont, joined Kapuku on stage alongside Derrick Young-Khon and Annabelle Denis of Airtel. In remarks carried by Seychelles Nation, the two sides described the deal as a way of pairing high-speed connectivity with local programming so that customers have a reason to use the extra bandwidth beyond generic streaming.
The infrastructure behind the launch has been in the works for years. Airtel Africa signed a turnkey agreement with Ericsson in 2021 to modernise the Seychelles network and relocate it to a new data centre, with the explicit goal of preparing the operator for VoLTE and 5G services. The deal, reported by ITWeb Africa, laid the groundwork for the Friday launch by giving Airtel a virtualised core and a hybrid network cloud environment that the company says reduces the time it takes to deploy new services.
The Seychelles roll-out comes against a wider African backdrop in which Bharti Airtel has been expanding 5G coverage in larger markets, including India, while smaller island operations have lagged. Airtel Seychelles is a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, the Indian telecommunications group that operates across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
For customers, the practical change will be visible in three places: handset speed tests on compatible devices, home routers that no longer need a fixed fibre line, and the addition of SBC’s television channels to data plans. Whether 5G replaces fixed broadband at scale in Seychelles will depend on how widely the new packages are taken up and on how Airtel prices the home router service relative to existing fibre offerings.
Airtel did not immediately publish a coverage map showing which districts of Mahé, Praslin and La Digue will receive 5G signal at launch, and the report in Seychelles Nation did not name specific rollout dates for the outer islands.
📷 Photo: Cvmontuy via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sources cited: ITWeb Africa, “Airtel Seychelles partners Ericsson on turnkey 5G project,” 2021,. ITWeb Africa, “Seychelles operator CWS launches 5G network”,. Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation, “5G mobile network coming to Seychelles”.
Source: SN
