Congo and Angola join forces to stop cross-border signal spill 🇨🇬 📡 🇦🇴

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In Pointe-Noire, for three straight days, a conference room buzzed with the back-and-forth of telecom engineers armed with calculations, coverage maps, and radio scans. From August 5–7, regulators from Congo and Angola tackled a persistent but mostly invisible issue: radio signals spilling across their shared border as if it didn’t exist.

By the end of the meeting, the Congolese regulator — the Regulatory Agency for Posts and Electronic Communications (ARPCE) — and Angola’s National Communications Institute (INACOM) agreed on a first-of-its-kind technical accord to coordinate spectrum use along all 231 kilometers of their common frontier.

An invisible — but costly — problem 💸

In border regions, residents sometimes find their phones automatically latching onto a carrier from the neighboring country. This “accidental roaming” can lead to inflated bills and spotty service. On top of that, overlapping frequencies create interference that disrupts connections and undermines network reliability.

Operators feel the pain too. Towers near the border can beam signals several kilometers beyond national limits, causing network overlap. In some cases, Angolan shops sell Congolese SIM cards — and vice versa — in clear violation of the rules.

The new agreement sets hard limits to address this:

• Signal coverage capped at 1,000 meters beyond the border
• Removal of overly powerful omnidirectional antennas
• Closure of unauthorized SIM sales points

Ground checks make the difference 👀

To make sure policy was rooted in reality, the Congolese and Angolan teams carried out joint field inspections.

In Tchiamba-Nzassi on the Congolese side and Massabi in Angola, they found towers blasting well past the border. They also spotted market stalls selling foreign SIMs, sometimes at cut-rate prices.

“We had to move fast. These practices distort the market and erode consumer trust,” said one Congolese technician who took part in the site visits.

A step toward regional digital integration 🌍

This isn’t Congo’s first spectrum-sharing handshake. ARPCE struck similar deals with the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2021 and Gabon in 2023. Talks with Cameroon are already well underway, part of a broader push to harmonize spectrum policies across Central Africa.

The measures agreed in Pointe-Noire will be formally signed in the coming weeks by ARPCE’s Louis Marc Sakala and INACOM’s Joaquim Domingos Muhogo. Once notified, operators will have 60 days to comply.

Controlled airwaves, calmer borders 🤝

Behind the technical jargon lies a simple goal: to improve service for people living in border zones. Reducing interference and accidental roaming should translate into more stable, reliable connectivity.

But there’s a diplomatic layer too. As digital sovereignty becomes a hotter topic, spectrum coordination is a way of saying that “radio borders” matter just as much as physical ones. With this deal, ARPCE positions itself as a driving force for a Central Africa that’s connected, but disciplined — where signals flow freely, but only where they’re meant to.

👉🏾 Could this kind of spectrum pact be expanded across all of Central Africa to boost connectivity?