Cameroon
Power & telecom standards in Cameroon
Connectivity Overview
Tempest Telecom offered dial-up internet access, WiFi hotspot access and broadband ethernet access in Cameroon. We also offered Iridium satellite Internet and Voice access in Cameroon for communications in rural areas without infrastructure.
Cameroon uses 220V at 50Hz. Power outlets are type C, E and telephone jacks are RJ-11.
Dial-up Internet Access
Tempest Telecom provided local dial-up access numbers in Cameroon at $0.255/minute. Travelers could connect using any standard modem with an RJ-11 telephone adapter.
WiFi Hotspot Access
Tempest Telecom provided WiFi hotspot access in Cameroon at $19.95/day for unlimited browsing.
Adapters & Power
Travelers from North America will need a power plug adapter. European Type C/F adapters are widely compatible.
Standard RJ-11 jacks are used. Most international modems will connect without an adapter.
Cameroon at a Glance
- Capital
- Yaounde
- Phone Code
- +237
- Voltage
- 220V / 50Hz
- Power Plug
- C, E
- Phone Jack
- RJ-11
- Currency
- CFA Franc
- Dial-up
- $0.255/min
- WiFi
- $19.95/day
About connectivity in Cameroon
Cameroon uses 220V/50Hz with Type C and Type E outlets — the French-standard wiring reflecting the colonial French Trust Territory heritage (Cameroon's bilingual French/English status comes from the post-WWI partition of the former German Kamerun colony between France and Britain). The phone jack is RJ-11. Camtel (Cameroon Telecommunications), the state operator, holds the fixed-line monopoly. The mobile market is dominated by Orange Cameroon and MTN Cameroon, with Nexttel (the Vietnamese Viettel subsidiary) competing.
Cameroonian commercial Internet emerged in 1997 through Camnet and a small number of regional ISPs. Per-minute metered dial-up through Camtel PSTN at relatively high prices kept Internet penetration low through the 2000s. The 2012 arrival of the WACS underwater fiber-optic cable (and the broader Central African Backbone connectivity) substantially expanded international bandwidth. Mobile data dominates current Cameroonian Internet access. The post-2017 Anglophone Crisis in the country's English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions has produced repeated government-imposed Internet shutdowns and access restrictions.
Camtel cardphone deployment was modest, with mobile prepaid airtime quickly becoming the dominant prepaid product. The Cameroonian prepaid international calling-card market through the 2000s and 2010s served the substantial outbound Cameroonian diaspora — concentrated in France (the largest community outside Cameroon), Italy, Germany, the United States (particularly Maryland, Texas, and California), and Belgium. The country's bilingual status sustained dual francophone and anglophone calling patterns.
Tempest Telecom served Cameroon through dial-up POPs in Yaoundé and Douala. Iridium satphones served the Congo Basin rainforest expedition customer base, the offshore oil-and-gas sector around the Bakassi peninsula, the southern coastal maritime industry, and humanitarian operators across the Central African regional refugee response.
Modern Cameroon has expanding mobile-data coverage with 4G LTE in major cities; FTTH is concentrated in Yaoundé and Douala. Periodic government-imposed Internet shutdowns in the Anglophone regions affect connectivity in those areas.
Tempest's services across Cameroon, 1997–2012
Tempest Telecommunications operated international connectivity services in Cameroon between 1997 and 2012 under a unified prepaid account that absorbed multiple service types onto a single customer credential. Customers in Cameroon drew from the same balance for pre-paid international voice calling, RADIUS-authenticated dial-up Internet roaming, metered Wi-Fi hotspot access, Iridium and Thuraya satellite voice, and Inmarsat BGAN and Thuraya data terminals. An attempted kiosk-payment federation (PATN, 1998) extended the same architecture to public Internet terminals but failed to reach scale.
Both Iridium (global LEO) and Thuraya (regional GEO) satellite voice were available in Cameroon from approximately 2001, alongside global BGAN data from late 2005.
Nearby countries in Africa
Benin · Botswana · Burkina Faso · Burundi · Cape Verde · Central African Republic · Chad · Comoros