MTN has continued to show its market dominance in the Nigeria telecommunications market.
In the past year, the MTN Nigeria, the only Mobile Network Operator (MNO), that has successfully launched the fifth generation (5G) technology in the country, increased its subscriber base by 15,421,996.
TechEconomy checks across Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC’s) website reveals that MTN dominated the mobile number portability activities during the year.
Rising from COVID-19 pandemic that slowed global economies, MTN launched its Ambition 2025 to become the leading digital solutions for Africa’s progress, harnessing the power of the Group.
The ambition is anchored on MTN’s leading brand, footprint, connectivity infrastructure and technology platforms hence it is positioned to build the largest and most valuable platform business with a clear focus on Africa.
This rests on a scale connectivity and infrastructure business – mobile and fixed access networks in the consumer, enterprise and wholesale segments.
In Nigeria, MTN is already demonstrating this through the deployment of 5G network.
Over the years, there has been a remarkable improvement and steady growth of mobile network performance in the Nigerian telecom industry.
This growth in the sector stems from the deployment of the 2G network, 3G Network, and the 4G LTE which presently has substantially increased coverage in major commercial cities.
The four major mobile operators (Airtel, MTN, 9mobile, and Glo) have made efforts to ensure that the quality of their coverages continue to improve.
This, they are doing, despite challenges that limit the capacity to deploy fiber infrastructure at a large scale, multiple taxes, and the Right of Way issues at different levels of Government.
With all these underlying challenges in the telecom sector, MTN, in August 2021 deployed 5G technology which is 10 to 20 times faster than 4G — realistically between 100 and 200 Mbit/sec.
Although, the available 4G LTE networks are more than fast enough for all the video and music streaming you want to do on your phone. However, 5G will offer faster data speeds.
5G has much lower latency — from around 20 milliseconds for previous networks to about 1 millisecond with 5G — so everything in the cloud will be more responsive and video calls will be a lot better.
5G is unleashing new business models and enabling economic growth. It will empower IoT, telemedicine, driverless cars, smart transportation, smart cities, etc.
With the current 4G LTE connection which is only about 10 percent in terms of coverage, it takes about six minutes to download a two-hour movie. On a 5G network, that same movie could be downloaded in 3.6 seconds.
Truly, there are a whole lot of work that needs to be done to put Africa’s most populous nation among the drivers of modern technology with 5G, however, the train has left its station…the journey has just started.
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