MTN’s tagline is no longer ‘everywhere you go,’ but with its recent fibre broadband push into 30 million African homes, it still wants you to remember that promise. Africa’s largest telecoms operator now says one of its biggest growth priorities over the next five years will not come from selling more mobile SIM cards, but turning homes and small businesses into fixed broadband customers, using a mix of fibre and fixed wireless.
State of play: It’s a shift from how African telcos have invested for most of the last three decades, when the priority was building mobile coverage so people could get online through their phones. CEO Ralph Mupita told investors that as work, school, and entertainment move online, “homes will account for a predominant share of digital workloads,” and MTN wants to be the one piping that traffic.
The numbers back that ambition: MTN plans to connect 20–30 million homes across its markets, and MTN Nigeria, the group’s subsidiary, invested about ₦1 trillion ($737 million) in fibre and added over 281,000 home users in one quarter of 2025.
Between the lines: MTN is also frank that this is about fixing a usage gap. Its customers currently use just over 12GB of data a month on average, compared to around 36GB in markets like India, and India itself was sitting at roughly the same 12GB level only about seven years ago. If MTN can get more Africans on reliable home connections and layer streaming, education, gaming, and SME tools on top, every extra gigabyte becomes new revenue.
That is why the home push sits alongside its fintech plans and potential IHS Towers acquisition; MTN is trying to own not just where Africans connect, but how much and for what. MTN is also moving to absorb 2,762 IHS Towers employees in its $2.2 billion tower buyout, tightening its grip on the institutional memory, the skilled talent, and the infrastructure that will carry all that extra home traffic.
