Summary

  • ANRT Decision 01/26 applies Morocco’s Article 22Bis framework to Uni Fiber’s passive FTTH reference offer, the first such approval for an actor other than licensed telecom operators.
  • The offer governs access to infrastructure Uni Fiber establishes; ANRT expressly says it need not build new aggregation points or links between points of mutualisation.

Morocco’s fibre debate has acquired a new kind of infrastructure owner. On 14 May 2026, the National Telecommunications Regulatory Agency (ANRT) announced approval of Uni Fiber’s reference offer for passive fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) sharing. The agency called it the first wholesale reference offer approved for an actor other than a licensed telecom operator. The distinction matters because the legal question is no longer only what a licensee must open to rivals. It is also how access duties follow infrastructure into an affiliated or jointly controlled company.

The decision is grounded in Article 22Bis(4) of Law 24-96. ANRT says that the provision reaches certain entities linked to public telecommunications network operators, including subsidiaries, and requires reference offers for infrastructure available to them. The statute and the decision describe control, influence and infrastructure management as links that can bring an entity within the rule. Uni Fiber is a joint venture associated with two licensed operators.

ANRT’s approval therefore tests whether a wholesale access framework can attach to the infrastructure-holding vehicle, rather than stopping at the corporate boundary of the licensed firms.

The product at issue is passive access, not a consumer broadband plan. A requesting operator gets a non-activated fibre path from a point of mutualisation (PM) toward an optical termination at a customer’s premises or a mobile antenna connection point known as a PRAM. The offer can make ducts, civil works, fibre and related information usable without requiring each operator to duplicate the same local build. It does not itself activate a retail connection, set a household’s service quality or prove that a home is within reach of fibre.

That last distinction is the decision’s most useful limit. ANRT expressly says Uni Fiber is not required to deploy additional aggregation points or links between PMs. If Uni Fiber builds infrastructure covered by the offer, requesting operators can seek access under its terms. But an obligation to share an asset that exists or is built is not an obligation to create the asset everywhere. The difference separates a regulated wholesale interface from a geographic construction mandate.

The approval follows a 2025 phase in which ANRT approved passive-sharing offers for Itissalat Al-Maghrib (IAM), Médi Telecom and Wana Corporate. Those licensee offers described access at a PM, including a line toward a customer termination or another operator’s PRAM, and required regular georeferenced information about covered areas and planned deployment. In June 2025, ANRT also approved the IAM–Wana joint venture arrangement associated with Uni Fiber and Uni Tower. These steps form the institutional sequence; they are not evidence that Uni Fiber has completed a particular rollout.

Decision 01/26 turns the reference offer into an operating process. Uni Fiber must respond to requests from the approval date even while the parties continue to discuss their commercial conventions. It cannot prioritize one requesting operator over another. The offer also specifies ordering, after-sales service, information and billing arrangements; ANRT can require changes to the offer, and coverage and planned-build data must be supplied in a georeferenced form under the agency’s timetable. These provisions make access contestable through records: a request, a response, a service order, a repair path and a reported footprint.

The resulting accountability is narrower, and more concrete, than a promise of nationwide fibre. Regulators and operators can ask whether a request was answered, whether terms were applied without priority, whether the relevant PM and route information were supplied, and whether reported coverage distinguishes existing assets from plans. They cannot infer from approval alone that all districts are served, that prices have fallen by a measurable amount, or that retail competition has improved. ANRT describes those as aims of the framework, not outcomes established by the decision.

The institutional significance is that access obligations may travel with control over passive infrastructure even when its holder is not itself a licensed retail or network operator. That can reduce the value of placing assets in a separate vehicle solely to keep them outside an access framework. Yet the same instrument leaves investment geography largely to the infrastructure plan: it disciplines access to build without compelling the build itself.

Morocco has clarified who must offer access and how requests should be handled; the harder public question is whether future footprints, disclosed separately from completed coverage, reach places where duplication would otherwise be uneconomic.

Sources: ANRT Decision 01/26; ANRT announcement, 14 May 2026; Law 24-96; ANRT Decision 09/25; ANRT Decision 08/2025; Morocco Official Bulletin 7458; Maroc Telecom: Uni Fiber and Uni Tower.

ANRT official bulletin copy of Decision 08/2025