Madagascar
Power & telecom standards in Madagascar
Connectivity Overview
Tempest Telecom offered dial-up internet access, WiFi hotspot access and broadband ethernet access in Madagascar. We also offered Iridium satellite Internet and Voice access in Madagascar for communications in rural areas without infrastructure.
Madagascar uses 220V at 50Hz. Power outlets are type C, D, E, J, K and telephone jacks are RJ-11.
Dial-up Internet Access
Tempest Telecom provided local dial-up access numbers in Madagascar 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 Madagascar 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.
Madagascar at a Glance
- Capital
- Antananarivo
- Phone Code
- +261
- Voltage
- 220V / 50Hz
- Power Plug
- C, D, E, J, K
- Phone Jack
- RJ-11
- Currency
- Ariary
- Dial-up
- $0.255/min
- WiFi
- $19.95/day
About connectivity in Madagascar
Madagascar uses 220V/50Hz with Type C, Type D, Type E, Type J, and Type K outlets — one of the most unusual five-type plug mixes in the African dataset, reflecting layered French colonial-era wiring (Type C/E), Swiss (Type J, transmitted through historical aid/development infrastructure), and Danish (Type K) installations. The phone jack is RJ-11. Telma (Telecom Malagasy), the post-2004 successor to the colonial-era postal-telecom operations, holds substantial fixed-line market position. Orange Madagascar and Airtel Madagascar compete in mobile.
Malagasy commercial Internet emerged in the late 1990s through Telma and Simicro. Per-minute metered dial-up dominated the late 1990s and early 2000s. The 2009 arrival of the EASSy and LION underwater fiber-optic cables substantially expanded Indian-Ocean international bandwidth. Mobile data dominates current Malagasy Internet access; recurring political instability (the 2009 constitutional crisis, subsequent governance challenges) has constrained sustained infrastructure investment.
Telma cardphone deployment was modest. The Malagasy prepaid international calling-card market through the 2000s and 2010s served the modest Malagasy outbound diaspora — concentrated in France (the historic colonial-era community, particularly in Marseille and the Île-de-France), Comoros, Réunion (the French overseas department off Madagascar's east coast), and the broader Indian Ocean francophone region.
Tempest Telecom served Madagascar through dial-up POPs in Antananarivo. Iridium satphones served the substantial mining sector (the Ambatovy nickel-cobalt operations, ilmenite-mining in the south), the vanilla-export agricultural sector (Madagascar produces over 80% of the world's vanilla), the unique biodiversity-research customer base (Madagascar's flora and fauna include thousands of species found nowhere else), and NGO operators across the recurring drought and cyclone humanitarian customer base in the southern provinces.
Modern Madagascar has expanding 4G LTE coverage in Antananarivo and the regional centers; FTTH is concentrated in the capital. The country's topography and population dispersion continue to constrain rural connectivity.
Tempest's services across Madagascar, 1997–2012
Tempest Telecommunications operated international connectivity services in Madagascar between 1997 and 2012 under a unified prepaid account that absorbed multiple service types onto a single customer credential. Customers in Madagascar 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 Madagascar from approximately 2001, alongside global BGAN data from late 2005.
Nearby countries in Africa
Kenya · Lesotho · Liberia · Libya · Malawi · Mali · Mauritania · Mauritius