The Director-General of the National Communications Authority, Dr. Joe Anokye has revealed that AT Ghana gained about 100,000 new customers during the March industry-wide Internet outage because AT invested wisely and positioned themselves to take advantage of the situation.
He was speaking in an exclusive interview on an Accra radio station, particularly in response to a campaign against rising mobile data prices.
Techfocus24 can confirm that indeed, AT Ghana signed up over 95,000 new customers during the March 2024 internet outage, which resulted from cuts on all four undersea cables on which Ghana’s telcos, internet service providers, some banks and other institutions are connected for the purposes of providing internet services in Ghana.
All four cables – SAT-3, WACS, MainOne and ACE originate from the West (Spain, Portugal and France) through the Atlantic Ocean down to South Africa. All the telcos in Ghana are connected to at least two of those four cables.
What made AT Ghana stand out was the fact that, apart from acquiring redundant capacities on some of the four cables coming from the West, they also invested in acquiring capacity on another cable called WIOCC (West Indian Ocean Cable Company) which is from India in the East, and was therefore not affected.
So, during the outage on the four cables coming from the West, AT Ghana quickly migrated all of its load to the WIOCC and restored internet services within a few hours, while other telcos and ISPs had to be in the woods for days.
As a result, the NCA had to grant a special regime for AT Ghana to register and activate SIM cards for new customers quicker than the current SIM registration process requires. That was how AT Ghana registered so many people within a short time.
Subsequently, a lot of those customers went on and regularized their registration by providing further and better particulars.
Dr. Joe Anokye alluded to the AT Ghana story as an example of how investment in a network can result in benefits in terms of a boost in subscriber levels.
He therefore noted that the reason MTN Ghana has, for instance, grown so big and its size now poses a threat to the survival of the rest of the telcos was not because the regulator aided them, but because MTN kept investing while the others simply did not.
MTN Investments
Indeed, for the 27 years that MTN has been in Ghana, they have invested an estimated $6 billion plus in their network and currently they are in the process of investing an additional $1 billion between 2021 and 2025.
Around 2011-2012 when NCA directed all telcos to expand 3G across the country – all telcos reportedly took loans for the purpose, but it was only MTN that eventually provided nationwide 3G coverage. None of the rest met the deadline, but NCA did not sanction any telco for failing to meet that deadline.
In the process of spreading their 3G coverage nationwide, MTN gained a reported one million plus customers in just one year. That confirms Dr. Anokye’s assertion that growth is a function of investment and not regulation.
Transparency
Over the years, MTN is the only network that has been transparent enough to share their numbers with the public through an annual Editors Forum, in terms of what they are investing, what revenue and profits they are making and what kind of impact the investment is having on the network.
All other telcos, which have operated in Ghana – Vodafone, Airtel, Tigo, Glo and Expresso have always maintained an opaque reporting system which makes it difficult for journalists and the public to know how much they are investing and how they are performing.
In fact, years ago, after this writer had managed to get some scanty information about Ghana from the group websites of Tigo, Vodafone and Expresso, all the three companies subsequently changed their reporting style just to hide all information about Ghana and make it difficult for anyone to know about their Ghana operations. Meanwhile, the government of Ghana, and for that matter Ghanaians have always had 30% shares in Vodafone and 10% shares in Airtel.
These and many other reasons are why Ghanaians are finding it hard to accept that MTN Ghana has been compelled by NCA to increase prices as a way to protect the other telcos from collapsing.
But as Dr. Anokye explained – data prices have not gone up in Ghana since November 2023 and moreover, the NCA has a duty to ensure that the telecoms industry does not slide into a monopoly, hence the need to apply an ITU approved mechanism such as naming MTN a significant market power to pave the way for MTN to be regulated.
He, however, assured the public that NCA has started strategic consultations towards addressing the data price issue.
