Tmcel, the country's state-owned telecommunications operator, must "immediately" pay 200 million meticais to Vodacom, the market leader, to maintain the interconnection between the two, they announced in a statement.

The amount corresponds to one third of Tmcel's debt claimed by Vodacom.

The state operator still has 90 days to present a concrete proposal for payment of the remaining 400 million meticais of interconnection debt.

Also according to the agreement, the state operator must make monthly payments of 12 million meticals from the interconnection bills, in order not to allow a new accumulation of debt.

The agreement comes after Vodacom threatened on June 15 to cut communications with Tmcel due to "successive defaults" since 2018.

After going through a crisis, the state-owned operator Tmcel, the first in Mozambique, was one of the companies restructured by the Government, as part of the revision of its portfolio of holdings adopted in recent years.

Tmcel is the result of the merger of state-owned telecommunications operators Moçambique Celular (Mcel) and Telecomunicações de Moçambique (TDM), announced in 2016 as part of the restructuring of the public corporate sector.

Latest data from Mozambique's National Institute of Communications indicates that Vodacom has the largest mobile data market share, with about six million customers, followed by Movitel, with about four million, and the state-owned TMcel, with just over three million customers.