For most of the last decade, a few African governments bet on a clean idea: instead of letting every operator build its own towers and radio networks, hand the job to a single wholesale operator and let everyone else lease capacity from it. Ghana, Rwanda and, briefly, South Africa all tried versions of this. This month's news out of Ghana is the clearest sign yet that the model isn't working the way it was designed to — and operators and regulators are quietly replacing it with something messier, but more commercial.
Ghana's experiment ran into reality
Ghana's Next Gen Infraco (NGIC) received a 10-year exclusive licence in May 2024 to build the country's shared 5G network, with mobile operators expected to lease capacity rather than build their own. By March 2026, NGIC had just 49 operational 5G sites against a plan of 4,400 — and as of January 2025, no operator had actually leased capacity from it. On 15 July 2026, Ghana's National Communications Authority removed the exclusivity clause and opened spectrum applications directly to operators. MTN Ghana, Telecel Ghana and Goal Telecom qualified in September, and on 6 October MTN Ghana received a formal notice of award for 700 MHz and 3 GHz spectrum under 15-year licences, with fees totalling roughly $200 million.
Rwanda and South Africa tell a similar story
Rwanda's Korea Telecom Rwanda Networks took a 25-year licence in 2013 and built 4G coverage reaching about 97% of the population — but usage sat at only around 2% by early 2023. Once the market opened to competition that year, MTN and Airtel launched their own 4G networks, and GSMA figures show 4G penetration climbing from 2% to 30% within two years. South Africa's planned wholesale open-access network never got off the ground at all: its 2022 spectrum auction sold directly to existing operators instead, and the reserved spectrum sat unused while the market waited. The common thread is straightforward — an operator with no competitive pressure has little reason to build quickly or price competitively, and separating investment from retail competition weakens the incentive to invest in the first place.
What's replacing it: three layers of commercial sharing
Rather than one state-designed monopoly, operators are now sharing infrastructure commercially, layer by layer, while keeping control of their own networks and spectrum:
- Passive infrastructure — towers, civil works and power, shared through tower companies. In the DRC, Eastcastle Infrastructure secured a $32.8 million loan in August to build over 700 towers, and Helios Towers has roughly $110 million of investment planned for 2026.
- Active network sharing — operators sharing radio equipment and base stations while running separate core networks. MTN and Airtel Africa signed sharing agreements covering Uganda and Nigeria, and Airtel Africa agreed with Vodacom in 2025 to share infrastructure across Mozambique, Tanzania and the DRC, pending regulatory approval. Airtel Africa CEO Sunil Taldar put the logic plainly: it has become "a business imperative for us to collaborate" on critical infrastructure.
- Spectrum — regulators assigning spectrum directly to operators rather than channelling it through a single wholesaler, as Ghana is now doing and Rwanda already did in 2023.
Kenya, for its part, is drafting its own infrastructure-sharing rules, which puts it in the same camp as regulators still building the oversight tools needed to referee commercial sharing deals — questions like network priority during congestion, wholesale pricing and who's liable for an outage are still largely unsettled across the continent.
What this means if you're running an ISP
None of this changes who owns the hardest part of the business: getting paid. Whether an operator builds its own towers, leases space on a shared one, or shares active radio gear with a competitor, the retail relationship with the subscriber — provisioning a connection, collecting payment, and cutting access the moment someone falls behind — stays entirely on that ISP's own books. If anything, a more competitive, capital-constrained infrastructure layer raises the stakes on the billing side: tighter margins mean less tolerance for unpaid accounts sitting active, and for manual M-Pesa reconciliation eating into the hours that should go toward growing the subscriber base.
That's the layer XpressRADIUS is built for — real-time RADIUS control over your access network tied directly to M-Pesa and Kopo Kopo payments, so PPPoE and hotspot subscribers are disconnected and reconnected automatically as soon as a payment clears or lapses, regardless of how the infrastructure underneath them is shared or owned.
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