MTN has ambitious plans to “wire” Africa with fibre, building what it calls a “fibre railroad” and establishing fibre companies (fibreco’s) in every region where it operates to accomplish this.
The group aims to build the new fibre networks much in the same way railway lines were built across Africa many years ago to connect cities and enable seamless transport, said MTN South Africa CEO Charles Molapisi.
“We want to participate in the construction of new fibre rails on the continent,” he told delegates at the Connect Africa conference, held in Johannesburg, noting that the group is setting up the entities that are going to provide continentwide connectivity.
“We are wiring the continent at scale. We are opening fibre companies in every market in which we operate, [for example] Fibreco Zambia and Fibreco Ghana. South Africa’s fibreco is being incorporated as we speak.”
This followed MTN Group’s recent rebrand of its fibre play, MTN GlobalConnect, to Bayobab, as part of its strategic transformation journey to connect Africa with open next-generation digital solutions through two distinct businesses, Bayobab Fibre and Bayobab Communication Platforms.
The rebrand was one of the first steps in MTN Group’s Ambition 2025 strategy to structurally separate its fibre business, which is targeted for completion by 2024.
Bayobab aims to become a one-stop shop for connectivity and offer end-to-end solutions, combining subsea cables, terrestrial fibre – cross-border, national long-distance and metropolitan – and data centres.
The group operates the largest pan-African terrestrial fibre network, with a 107 000 km proprietary fibre networknetwork. It also has about 300 000 km of subsea equivalent fibre, through access to about 16 submarine cables – with another, 2Africa, set to be completed in 2023/24.