Network sharing is not a recent trend, but the current economic environment, increasing competition and pressure on margins across MEA markets, is making operators consider it in order to achieve significant savings in capex and opex," Victor Font, managing partner at Delta Partners, told ArabianBusiness.com. "In some case, infrastructure sharing is the only viable way to access rural areas and penetrate lower end segments."

Delta forecasts that several tower sharing deals will be announced in the coming twelve to eighteen months and these could potentially involve some of the large pan-regional operators. The concept isn't new and recent multi-billion dollar sharing deals have been concluded in India and last month's announcement that Vodafone and Telefonica are to share parts of their European network infrastructure further bolsters the case.

In the fixed line communications market, UAE operator du is also championing the sharing concept and has gone on record to state that it thinks competition in the broadband internet market will only emerge when telcos can share each others' networks.