Six years after Ghana’s telecommunications regulator labelled MTN Ghana a Significant Market Power (SMP) operator and rolled out measures to rein in its dominance, the latest market data reveals those interventions have failed comprehensively, with MTN now controlling 81.29 percent of mobile data subscriptions and 72.12 percent of voice subscriptions as of February 2026.
The figures, published by the National Communications Authority (NCA), show Telecel Ghana and AT Ghana trailing at 14.5 percent and 4.2 percent of data subscriptions respectively, and 20.7 percent and 7.2 percent on the voice side. The gap between the market leader and its rivals has not narrowed since the SMP designation. It has widened dramatically.
When the NCA named MTN an SMP operator in June 2020, the company held approximately 55 percent of the voice market and 67 percent of the data market. The measures that followed were designed to correct that imbalance. MTN was denied 30 percent of its interconnect fee earnings, forced to collapse its affordable data bundles and obligated to share its network infrastructure to give smaller competitors room to grow. Two years into implementation, MTN had not shrunk. It had stretched its voice market share by roughly 20 percentage points and its data market share by nearly 13 percentage points, making the regulatory tools look counterproductive from the outset.
The engine of MTN’s growth has been consistent capital deployment rather than marketing or pricing strategy. By December 2025 the company had achieved 4G population coverage of 99.2 percent, effectively universal connectivity for all mobile devices in Ghana. As Ghanaian consumers increasingly abandon traditional voice calls in favour of WhatsApp and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, MTN’s near-universal 4G network has become its most durable competitive asset.
The new Communications Minister, Samuel Nartey George, acknowledged the policy failure publicly after taking office in 2025, describing the SMP regime as a tool that had been used to punish MTN rather than build a competitive market. He moved quickly to undo the constraints, restoring MTN’s affordable data bundles, granting it technology neutrality and allocating additional spectrum for 4G service improvements.
The final chapter of the SMP era now plays out in the 5G space. The NCA in February 2026 issued a formal notice to the country’s sole licensed 5G wholesaler, Next-Gen Infraco (NGIC), proposing to remove its exclusivity rights and open the spectrum to competitive auction. MTN, which had provisioned over 1,300 sites for 5G as far back as 2021 only to be blocked from obtaining a licence because of its SMP status, is now positioned to compete directly for 5G spectrum.
Government has insisted that all operators must launch commercial 5G services simultaneously to prevent a repeat of the 4G era, when a single operator moved ahead of the market and accumulated an advantage that six years of regulation could not undo. MTN has committed US$1.1 billion in capital investment over the next three years, with US$380 million earmarked for 2026 alone, signalling it intends to be the dominant force in 5G as comprehensively as it has been in 4G.
