Selorm Adavehoh, CEO of MTN Ghana, has expressed his expectations that the operator will be able to launch 5G services in the country as early as next year.
This comes from recent comments that Adavehoh made at the MTN@25 Business Executive Breakfast held at the Pan-African telecommunications company’s headquarters in Ghana, reported by Techgh2.
“Innovation has been a key pillar of our growth,” Adavehoh said, quoted by Developing Telecoms.
“We are always trying to make sure we can be the first to launch the next technology, but not only to be the first but to actually bring that technology to the market and create value out of that technology. So 2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G hopefully next year.”
MTN Redoubles Infratructure Plans
In order to achieve this goal, Adavehoh said that MTN Ghana is planning a $200-million overhaul of its network infrastructure in 2021. The investment will be substantially more than the initially planned $150-million as demand has risen due to the pandemic.
In April, MTN Ghana announced its initial spending infrastructure investment amount as the telco’s subscriber base grew by 0.6-million to 25.0-million.
Continued demand for data and increased adoption of more digital payment services supported the active data subscribers’ growth of 0.4-million to reach 11.2-million and MoMo users growth of 0.1-million to reach 10.7-million.
As part of this $200-million upgrade, the operator expects to deploy 4G at all base stations in Accra, the country’s capital, and all of its nationwide sites by the end of 2022.
According to Nperf, a telecom mapping site that shows the different scales of 2G to 5G adoption and prevalence across a country, Ghana has yet to introduce any 5G services.
If MTN manages to launch 5G before other major telcos in the country like Airtel, Vodafone and Glo, it will be the first operator to introduce the technology in the region.
Edited by Luis Monzon
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