MTN Swaziland says it is looking into infrastructural sharing with the Swaziland Electricity Company (SEC) and having its own fibres to minimise network disruptions.
Media reports from Mbabane say the company’s heavy reliance on SEC and the Swaziland Posts and Telecommunication Corporation (SPTC) was a major challenge for the company, which put a lot of pressure on its capital expenditure.
Speaking during a media breakfast briefing on Thursday, CEO Tebogo Mogapi said for instance, because the company does not carry its own traffic nor does it have its own gateway like its counterparts operating in South Africa and other countries, whatever it did was limited to what SPTC allowed.
Mogapi noted that this reliance on SPTC and SEC adversely affected MTN in the event there were power shortages or network disruptions and this put a lot of pressure on the company’s capital expenditure as it had to invest in a number of generators so as not to disrupt its own operations.
He said currently, MTN had about 50 generators on its sites and that created a big challenge. “For instance, like the time we had veld fires a couple of weeks ago, because of our heavy reliance on SPTC, once that goes, it affects our network enormously,” he said.
Mogapi said the mobile network company had to re-route traffic to certain areas, which in turn resulted in congestion. He said the company had not been allowed to build its own fibres, which was why when the companies they depend on got hit, the company had no alternative but to wait for them to resolve their issues.
Meanwhile, the parent company, MTN Group, Africa’s largest mobile-phone company, may begin operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo by buying a closely held company.
Bloomberg reported today that the Johannesburg-based company would follow Kuwait’s Hits Telecom Holding Co., which is set to become the central African country’s sixth cell-phone operator.
Congo’s mobile-phone industry, in which Vodafone Plc unit Vodacom Group Ltd. and Zain jointly control about 85 percent of the market, generates a third of annual government revenue. While the central African nation has 7 million subscribers, many people use multiple networks to reduce costs, suggesting that the mobile penetration rate is probably lower than the 11 percent estimated by the regulator.
