MTN exits Afghanistan amid strong revenue growth in core African markets; Deutsche Telekom makes good of a challenging economic environment; Google Fiber plans network expansion in the US; BT announces 5G SA technology breakthrough
A week in telecoms: MTN and Deutsche Telekom revenue growth; Google Fiber plans expansion; and BT announces 5G standalone technology breakthrough
MTN has accepted a binding offer for 100% of MTN Afghanistan, allowing it to focus on African markets, for which it has reported strong revenue growth. , the group’s service revenues reached R92.5 billion for th up 14.8%. Data revenue rose 35.9%, spurred by services in Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and South Africa, according to the company. Meanwhile fintech revenue increased 14.0%. As part of the company’s Ambition 2025 strategy it is building five platform businesses, including fintech, on top of its networks. In total MTN had 281.6 million subscribers during the period, of which 60.7 million used its Mobile Money service.
MTN is not the only communications service provider to have good news on revenues. Deutsche Telekom announced its revenue rose 5.9% to 28.2 billion euros in the second quarter of 2022. “We continue to grow, despite the difficult economic environment,” said Tim Höttges, Chairman of the Board of Management at Deutsche Telekom. “We are well on track this year to meet our ambitious targets announced at the 2021 Capital Markets Day.” Germany helped drive growth, but T-Mobile US, in which Deutsche Telekom holds a controlling stake, accounted for 66% of total Group revenue.
Also in the US, Light Reading shared a blog post by Dinesh Jain, CEO of Google Fiber, in which he shares plans to extend Google’s fiber network to cities in Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada and Idaho. The aim, he says, is to deliver on a “vision of providing the best possible gigabit internet service to our customers through relentless refinements to our service delivery and products”, although Google provides no details on which cities it has in its sights.
BT and Nokia also had network news, in the shape of advances in 5G standalone (5G SA) technology. BT claimed a European first with its demonstration of the aggregation of four carrier components over a “live” 5G SA network. BT and Nokia collaborated to combine 2.1GHz, 2.6GHz, 3.4GHz and 3.6GHz channels on EE’s network. BT explains that 5G carrier aggregation over a standalone network improves customer experience by effectively combining several transmission bands into one connection. This allows CSPs to provide higher capacity and speed to customer devices. “As we migrate to a 5G standalone core network, this technology milestone is vital to giving our customers the best experience,” said Greg McCall, Managing Director of Service Platforms at BT.