Algeria Telecom’s All-Fiber Plan: CEO Aït Saïd Maps Path to 7 Million Connected Households by 2027

What the May 12 Meeting Actually Announced

The May 12, 2026 government coordination meeting on telecom infrastructure put Algeria Telecom (AT) CEO Abdelghani Aït Saïd in front of Telecommunications Minister Sid Ali Zerrouki with a single, integrated roadmap rather than a list of separate projects. The plan ties together three moves that, together, redefine Algerian fixed broadband for the next decade: the orderly retirement of the legacy copper/DSL network by end-2027, a nationwide rollout of 5G fixed wireless access (5G FWA) starting early 2027, and the activation of the Medusa submarine cable expected late 2026.

According to Telecompaper’s coverage of the announcement, Aït Saïd framed 5G FWA as the workhorse for zones where trenching fiber is uneconomic — rural villages, isolated neighborhoods, and copper exchanges scheduled for retirement. The 5G FWA program is the bridge that lets the copper sunset proceed on schedule without leaving any household stranded on legacy infrastructure.

The household scale is meaningful. Algeria’s roughly 7.4 million total households make 7 million the practical ceiling that any nationwide broadband strategy targets. As of reporting by Ecofin Agency, more than 3 million homes were already connected to fiber as of February 2026. Closing the remaining gap — through a mix of FTTH expansion and 5G FWA — is what the May 12 plan operationalizes.

The Three Levers Aït Saïd Pulled at Once

This is not three parallel projects. It is one integrated upgrade with three reinforcing levers, each unblocking the others.

The first lever — speed tier upgrades — is already live. On April 13, 2026, AT doubled its FTTH baseline from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps and lifted ADSL from a typical 5-10 Mbps to 20 Mbps, with no price increase. This makes the base fiber product genuinely competitive with mid-tier offers in Paris, Madrid, or Dubai for general household use, and gives every fiber-connected home a real reason to abandon ADSL voluntarily — softening the demand-side load on the retirement schedule.

The second lever — 5G FWA — covers the zones where fiber economics break. As MEA TechWatch reports, the early-2027 launch target is now a ministerial directive, not just an operator ambition. 5G FWA can deliver fiber-class speeds (typically 100-500 Mbps) over the air, with deployment costs roughly an order of magnitude below trenching fiber in low-density areas. For Algeria’s mountainous interior, scattered Saharan settlements, and aging neighborhoods where civil works are restricted, this is the structurally correct technology choice.

The third lever — international capacity — closes the loop. The Medusa submarine cable, expected to land in late 2026, adds new Mediterranean-Europe capacity on top of Algeria’s existing five-cable footprint. According to Telecominfo Today’s analysis of the modernization push, Medusa is paired with a second submarine cable addition in the same window. More international capacity means lower wholesale transit costs, lower latency to European cloud regions, and more headroom for the traffic surge a fiber+5G FWA buildout will generate.

The Subscriber Reality That Anchors the Plan

The Algerian fixed broadband market is already moving in the direction the plan assumes. Fixed internet subscribers reached 6.82 million as of September 2025, and the segment growth mix has shifted sharply toward fiber and away from copper. Fibre is the fastest-growing subscription segment at 37.6%, ahead of ADSL at 32.3% and fixed LTE at 30%. Affordability has also improved: internet pricing sits at roughly 2.59% of gross national income per capita, well above the ITU’s 2% target but materially better than the 15.1% African average.

The structural conclusion: AT does not need to convince Algerian households to want fiber — demand is already there. The plan is about delivering supply quickly enough to absorb the migration that will accelerate as the copper sunset approaches. Every quarter of 2026 and 2027 matters because the lift is concentrated, not gradual.

What Algerian Enterprise IT Leaders Should Do

The May 12 plan is not just a consumer broadband story — it changes the connectivity baseline for every Algerian business that runs branches, call centres, point-of-sale terminals, or remote-work links over the legacy access network. The window to plan the migration is narrow, but the upside on cloud architecture, branch design, and unit economics is real.

1. Inventory every ADSL and fixed-LTE link by end of Q3 2026, with a documented migration target

Most Algerian enterprises do not have a single, current inventory of access circuits — branch ADSL lines, call-centre fixed LTE, remote-site copper drops, POS connectivity at retail outlets. Build this inventory now, with three fields per circuit: current technology, expected FTTH availability date in the building, and 5G FWA fallback feasibility. Map each circuit to one of three migration paths — direct FTTH order, 5G FWA at copper sunset, or SD-WAN overlay across whatever access exists. Without this inventory, you will discover circuits stranded on retired copper in Q4 2027 — a forced migration is always more expensive and more disruptive than a planned one.

2. Renegotiate your AT enterprise contract around the 100 Mbps baseline and gigabit ceiling, not the legacy ADSL benchmark

The April 2026 tier upgrade to 100 Mbps FTTH and the existing Idoom Fibre Giga+ 1.6 Gbps offer change what “reasonable” looks like in a corporate contract. If your master service agreement still references 20-50 Mbps tiers, you are leaving capacity and SLA leverage on the table. Push for a refreshed bandwidth matrix, latency commitments to the new submarine-cable transit (Medusa + the announced second cable will improve Europe latency), and explicit treatment of 5G FWA as a primary access type, not a backup. Use the timing — AT is incentivized to lock enterprise commitments ahead of the consumer migration peak.

3. Treat 5G FWA as a Tier-1 enterprise access option, not an emergency backup

In most Algerian enterprise architectures today, 4G/LTE is the failover behind primary copper or fiber. The early-2027 5G FWA launch flips that logic for a significant subset of sites. For new branches in zones without fiber, for temporary sites, for retail pop-ups, and for any site where civil works delay fiber by 6-18 months, 5G FWA at fiber-class speeds becomes the right primary connection. Architect your SD-WAN policies, security posture, and cloud routing now to accept FWA as a first-class WAN underlay — not as a degraded fallback. The vendors selling SD-WAN, SASE, and zero-trust networking to Algerian enterprises should already be quoting designs that assume this hybrid.

4. Re-baseline your cloud connectivity assumptions against the new submarine-cable footprint

Medusa landing in late 2026 plus a second new cable changes the latency and capacity profile to European cloud regions. Workloads that today sit in Algerian co-location because Europe round-trip times are too high may become viable as cloud-resident services after Medusa is active. Re-run the math on your hybrid cloud split — what runs on-prem in Algiers or Oran, what runs in Marseille, Paris, or Frankfurt, what runs at the edge — once the new transit is live. Engage AT’s wholesale team early to understand the pricing posture on cross-border transit; the right time to lock multi-year commits is before consumer broadband demand fully absorbs the new capacity.

The Bigger Picture: An All-Fiber Country as an Industrial Asset

The strategic significance of the May 12 plan goes beyond the household connection count. Algeria is positioning fixed broadband infrastructure as a foundation for the next layer of digital industry: cloud-resident SaaS startups, distributed contact-centre operations, gigabit-class video and gaming, remote-work hubs in mid-sized cities, and the IoT and telemetry workloads that come with industrial modernization. Every one of those workload classes depends on a baseline that copper ADSL simply cannot deliver and that 5G FWA plus FTTH can.

What makes the plan credible is the sequencing — speed-tier upgrade first (already done), 5G FWA next (early 2027), Medusa active in the same window (late 2026), copper retired on schedule (end-2027). Each step compounds the next. The plan also signals to private operators, content providers, hyperscalers, and Algerian founders that the bandwidth floor is rising by an order of magnitude inside a 24-month horizon. For an enterprise IT leader, a startup founder, or a public-sector digitization team, the planning question is no longer “when will fiber arrive” — it is “what does the business look like when ubiquitous fiber-class connectivity is a given.” The May 12 roadmap is the answer Algeria Telecom has now put on the table.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• Algeria Increases Fixed-Line Internet Speeds, Fiber Upgraded to 100 Mbps — Ecofin Agency
• Algeria Sets Early 2027 as Launch Target for 5G FWA — Telecompaper
• Algeria Targets Early 2027 Launch of G5 LTE Fixed Internet Network Amid Telecom Modernisation Push — MEA TechWatch
• Modernizing 5G Wireless Home Internet Service in Algeria — Telecominfo Today