It was a little over 20 years ago when we celebrated over a seemingly unimportant piece of paper – the mobile telecommunications licence – which was awarded to the then M-Cell to provide mobile communication services.

At the time, we did not realise how that momentous occasion would transform the way people interact and communicate.
With the benefit of hindsight, we are taken aback at the modest growth forecasts for mobile penetration as they grossly underestimated consumers' appetite for connectivity.

When prepaid was introduced onto the market, it revolutionised the industry and gave millions of people the ability to give expression to the most intrinsic of human needs – the ability to connect and communicate.

The prepaid solution gave millions of people who lacked a credit history an opportunity to own a cellphone, and set the country and the continent firmly on the road to mobile connectivity. It gave ordinary people the opportunity to be part of the mobile revolution and opened a whole new world. Throughout the years, MTN has spent billions expanding its network and rural coverage in the face of rising fuel, labour and electricity costs.

For MTN, the introduction of MTN Zone went a long way towards making the costs of telecommunications affordable.

Innovative and hugely popular offerings such PayasYouGo, MTN Zone, and 50% Mahala Airtime, are just a few of the innovations that MTN introduced onto the market to reduce tariffs. In a bid to facilitate access to much-needed information, MTN has also given its customers free access to Wikipedia.

Our pilot of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network, otherwise known as 4G, gave our customers increased capacity and uplink and download speeds that had never before been experienced in South Africa. The commercial roll-out of LTE will go a long way towards meeting the needs of our data-hungry customers and smartphone users who continue to grow exponentially.

Further, MTN has its own fibre ring that provides connectivity between Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town, and this, in turn, is complemented by the high-capacity West Africa Cable System (WACS) and the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) in which we are substantial investors.

The introduction of the immensely popular MTN Steppa, the low-cost smartphone, is expected to introduce millions of people to the world of big data.

Today, there are more people who own a mobile phone than those with access to clean running water. The challenge for MTN and for the industry is how to harness the transformative power of this ubiquitous technology.

Since inception, MTN has been acutely conscious of the socioeconomic challenges facing the country. To that end, MTN has adopted a multi-pronged approach that focuses on education, health, the arts and entrepreneurship. The MTN Foundation has supplied school uniforms, connectivity and state-of-the-art technologies to impoverished schools to aid in the learning and teaching of mathematics and science. In the area of health, MTN Foundation has also introduced smart telemetry solutions to facilitate access to healthcare for remote communities.

The explosive growth of data has also opened up a whole new world of applications. Our subscribers are no longer content with being consumers of content, but aspire to create content as well. The bulk of the country’s population is under the age of 25, and this presents an opportunity because this segment of the population can leapfrog the industry to new heights by developing and monetising apps with local relevance.

So, solutions such as mobile money are pivotal; with unemployment remaining stubbornly high, it can help put the country on a new growth trajectory.

As we celebrate the first 20 years of the mobile revolution, government needs to make a concerted effort to make information and communication technology an integral part of its policy implementation.

Twenty years on, the information and technology environment continues to be a game changer and its transformative effects are felt across all industries and spheres of life. As the leading mobile operator in Africa, keeping up is not enough; we need to be setting the pace.