Ghana’s largest telecommunications operator is simultaneously executing its most aggressive network expansion in three decades and fighting what its own chief executive describes as the company’s single most dangerous operational problem: the steady, recurring destruction of the fibre infrastructure that holds the entire network together.
MTN Ghana has committed more than US$300 million in capital expenditure for 2026, with plans to deploy at least 500 new network sites across the country, a tenfold acceleration from the 50 sites constructed in 2025. Yet Chief Executive Stephen Blewett acknowledged at the company’s Accra Media and Stakeholder Forum on April 17 that approximately 157 network sites have recently been knocked offline by fibre cuts, underscoring how quickly new investment can be undermined by infrastructure damage on the ground.
The economics of the problem are stark. MTN Ghana spends roughly US$22 million annually repairing fibre cuts, with an additional GH₵20 million directed at relocating cables damaged by road construction activities. Every new site added to the network extends the fibre backbone further, and every extension creates additional exposure to the same forces that are already costing the company tens of millions of cedis each year.
Road contractors and property developers account for the majority of the damage. The National Communications Authority (NCA) confirmed in March that cuts to three of MTN’s transmission fibre cables disrupted services across 57 sites each on its 2G, 3G and 4G networks across parts of the Greater Accra Region. Theft and deliberate vandalism account for a growing share of incidents, with stolen telecom poles and stripped cell site components adding a separate layer of operational losses.
The scale of the national problem extends beyond a single operator. Ghana’s telecom sector recorded more than 5,600 fibre cut incidents in 2024, costing the industry an estimated US$9.2 million and consuming more than 432 cumulative days of restoration time. That figure represents a chronic structural drain on an industry trying to finance a digital transformation.
For MTN, the timing of its expansion sharpens the exposure. The company’s US$300 million capital commitment for 2026 makes the protection of existing infrastructure even more critical, since new sites connected by fibre that is subsequently cut would immediately degrade the quality of service the investment was designed to deliver. Blewett has framed infrastructure protection not as a commercial concern alone but as a matter of national interest, given that outages ripple across households, businesses, emergency services and the digital economy.
Ghana’s Chamber of Telecommunications has documented the scale of the crisis across the industry and, together with MTN, has been pursuing regulatory intervention. MTN’s network operations leadership has called on the Minister of Communications to establish a binding coordination mechanism that requires construction firms to notify and work with telecoms operators before excavation work begins near buried cables.
For an operator staking more than a billion dollars on Ghana’s digital future over the next three years, the answer to whether that investment delivers its intended returns may depend less on spectrum and technology than on whether a road contractor’s excavator misses a cable.
