MTN Ghana CEO Selorm Adadevoh has told local journalists that the company has modernized at least 1,322 sites in readiness for 5G network rollout, which is slated to take place next year.
The company has also upgraded its packet core capacity to 525 gigabits per second, which, it says, is designed to power its converged voice and data services on 4G LTE. It also aims to effectively deploy and operate one packet network for 2G, 3G and a wide range of other technologies.
According to the News Ghana site, the CEO also revealed that this year alone the company had invested some $207 million in network expansion to accommodate increasing demand for data due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
As a reminder that 5G is far from the only big story in West Africa, he said that the company has built 120 new 2G/3G sites and 607 new 4G sites this year.
MTN is currently on what it calls a journey to become a fully digital operator by 2023. This apparently involves enabling all of its stakeholders to access their services digitally, a concept that links to MTN Ghana’s Agenda 2025 strategy designed to make it a platform player rather than a service provider.
Agenda 2025 has five pillars – fintech solutions, digital services, enterprise services, network as a service, and API Marketplace. Its focus is to enable start-ups in Ghana to connect to the MTN platform and provide their own services to their own set of clients outside of MTN on a revenue share basis.
As a platform player, MTN will provide all the enablers for start-ups to innovate, create digital products, scale digital products and advertise and monetize them, and also be able to save or invest their money digitally, all at a minimized cost.