The Government of Ghana has today announce its partnership with seven industry players on a new shared infrastructure to deliver affordable 5G mobile broadband services across Ghana, but the leading telco, MTN Ghana is conspicuously missing from the novelty arrangement.
The seven partners are Ascend Digital, K-NET, Radisys, Nokia, and Tech Mahindra and two telcos – AT Ghana and Telecel Ghana. No MTN Ghana.
The partners have established the Next-Gen Infrastructure Company (NGIC), which has been awarded 5G license and expected to launch 5G services across Ghana within the next six months, followed by expansion to other parts of Africa.
The company will be the first 5G Mobile Broadband Shared Infrastructure Entity to build a nationwide 4G/5G network . It will also work with the telcos to launch affordable 4G/5G-enabled FWA CPEs and smartphones in Ghana within this calendar year.
The partnership aims to enhance the lives of Ghanaians by introducing digital services in education, healthcare, and digital payment transactions through P2P (peer-to-peer), P2M (peer-to-merchant) and M2M (merchant-to-merchant) systems , thereby  reducing -digital divide and promoting financial inclusion.
Additionally, the multiplayer partnership will support NGIC in the entire deployment of network infrastructure and associated services, as communications service providers (CSPs) are looking to address enterprise and consumer markets with enhanced digital services. To achieve this, Tech Mahindra will build a Cloud Native Core Network powered by leading OEM (original equipment manufacturer) platforms.
NGIC plans to adopt India’s successful model of affordable handsets, digital platforms, and localized content and applications. The goal is to replicate this high-speed mobile data model across Africa, beginning with Ghana.
MTN’s Absence
As stated above, the partnership is intended to improve the lives of Ghanaians, and greater majority of Ghanaian phone and internet users are MTN Ghana customers. Available data indicate MTN Ghana has between 60% to 70% of voice and data customers in the country.
So MTN’s absence from the 5G shared infrastructure arrangement is raising eyebrows.
It would be recalled that way back in 2021, MTN announced its readiness to roll out a 5G in 2022, two years ago, but the move was botched because the industry regulator, National Communications Authority (NCA) simply refused to grant MTN the license to go 5G.
Indeed, government had long planned to establish the shared 5G infrastructure as part of measures to correct the grave market imbalance for which MTN was declared significant market power (SMP) in June 2020 in the first place. So, allowing MTN to acquire a separate license to rollout 5G, while other telcos did not even have 4G, was going to worsen the imbalance the government wanted to cure.
Techfocus24 gathered from very reliable sources that MTN Ghana is having a separate discussion with government on their 5G strategy, in the hope of getting a bigger chunk of the shared infrastructure. But that is not likely to happen.
Meanwhile, currently, MTN has national roaming arrangements with both Telecel Ghana and AT Ghana to ensure their respective customers can benefit from each of their networks when it becomes necessary. So even if MTN does not join the newly established shared infrastructure arrangement, their customers can still enjoy 5G on other network through national roaming, except that the smaller networks will make the money.
Again, at the just-end 3i Africa Summit, one of the strongest proposals that stood out around digital public infrastructure (DPI), is partnerships and the need to have shared infrastructure, rather than competing infrastructure, to drive accelerated development in Africa through digital innovation.
In line with that, it will be expected that MTN will join the 5G shared infrastructure arrangement in the interest of a concerted development.
It is early days yet. Techfocus24 will keep you posted on further developments.
