Big Telco, Bigger Tech Machine: MNOs Finally Show Their Cards In Africa

Once upon a time, being a telco was cool. In the early 2000s, when today’s multi-trillion-dollar tech industry was still very nascent and not disrupting entire life patterns as is the case nowadays, telecoms was the hottest thing.

But times have changed. Two decades went by quickly and telecommunication companies became a victim of their own success. How so? Simply put, telcos have brought mobile cellular signal to ~97 percent of the world’s population, so there’s little left to do on that front.

Besides that, there’s WhatsApp, Telegram, and other over-the-top (OTT) services that have normalised free voice, video, and text messaging. Basically, these services are taking the ‘lunch money’ of telcos by increasingly replacing traditional dial-up voice telephony and narrowband services like SMS.