Big changes at MTN’s enterprise division
MTN Group is poised for a major shift in its enterprise and business-to-business division, where it is moving away from traditional mobile and voice services towards building network infrastructure.
Mazen Mroué, CEO of MTN Group’s digital infrastructure, said that connectivity remained the foundation of MTN Business’s offering, but future growth is expected to come from other products.
This included fixed connectivity, managed networks, cloud, cybersecurity, IoT, unified communications and collaboration, professional services, AI and data analytics.
“Businesses are increasingly procuring integrated technology solutions and business outcomes rather than standalone voice services or mobile subscriptions,” Mroué told MyBroadband.
“MTN’s strategy is therefore to use its mobile and fixed-network assets as a gateway to higher-value, recurring ICT services that help customers digitise and modernise their operations.”
Mroué said the total addressable enterprise market is expected to increase from approximately R391 billion in 2025 to R639 billion by 2030.
The group’s new strategy is based on the establishment of two new data centre facilities in South Africa and Nigeria to meet market demand.
“For data centres, our focus is on developing carrier-neutral, AI-ready digital infrastructure platforms in partnership with global, regional and local stakeholders,” said Mroué.
This means that MTN will lease its data centre capacity to other companies, potentially including competitors, as the group positions itself to become an infrastructure provider.
Mroué said that the data centre platforms are being designed around resilient power infrastructure and proximity to cable landing stations.
They will connect with “extensive terrestrial and subsea fibre networks to support the evolving needs of cloud, enterprise and AI-enabled workloads,” said Mroué.
Mroué called this a key evolution in the strategy of MTN Business, to extend digital infrastructure beyond traditional connectivity to include distributed computing capabilities.
“Through our investment in ODC, announced earlier this year alongside leading global technology and telecom companies, MTN is supporting the development of AI-native network infrastructure.”
Exploring AI-enabled computing
Mroué said that, over time, MTN’s investments in fibre, data centres, cloud, and intelligent network infrastructure will lay the foundations for African digital and AI economies that it can market.
“We are also participating in industry initiatives exploring how AI-enabled computing capabilities can be deployed closer to end users and enterprise applications,” he said.
Beyond infrastructure, MTN Business has also applied AI internally to improve customer experience on its products and also improve operational efficiency.
Group chief technology officer Charles Molapisi revealed during the company’s Capital Markets Day event in June that MTN had deployed AI for maintenance purposes on its fibre network.
“We lose a lot of service today because of fibre cuts. We have a lot of challenges in terms of excavation, road maintenance, and all of that,” said Molapisi.
“We are now turning the fibre network into a sensor network, which means it actually observes the micro-vibrations on the network and picks up patterns.”
The new technology is able to detect when physical disruptions affect MTN’s fibre Internet network across its African markets using agentic AI.
According to Molapisi, the AI learned how the fibre network is supposed to behave, and when it begins to misbehave, it can alert technicians to connectivity fluctuations.
He said the technology would shorten the time required to diagnose and repair damage to the fibre network, which previously took about 8 hours.
“When people are mobilising, and before they put that TLB down to dig, we are already there to manage and support ourselves,” he said.
Mroué revealed previously that MTN expected its fibre footprint across Africa to expand significantly in the coming years.
MTN has planned to expand its fibre network to between 420,000km and 560,000km by 2030 as it targets 100 million new data customers in Africa.
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