Power cuts hit MTN towers compared to 'poor' Nigeria

MTN is one of the worst-hit mobile telephone companies as the growing number of power cuts continue to cause devastation.

The power cuts have caused MTN’s network availability in South Africa to drop below levels in Nigeria, a country where electricity from the national grid is virtually non-existent. 

Several mobile operators have seriously struggled as extended ongoing load shedding has depleted the batteries of their cellphone towers, leading to the signal being dropped for customers.

Speaking to BusinessLIVE, MTN group head Ralph Mupita said their networks built in its two largest markets — SA and Nigeria — are vastly different due to power considerations. 

It is reported that in the West African country, the grid has failed to meet the demand for years, and the telecoms company built its network with backup power from the start, knowing it was essentially responsible for its own power generation.

However, that is not the case in South Africa where the assumption at MTN’s inception in 1994 was that Eskom would take care of all power requirements, provision for backup was not in mind.

“Let’s start with SA, which has 12,900 sites and they have different technology layers 2G, 3G, 4G, and now 5G,” said Mupita. 

“We’ve designed that whole network on the basis of 100% power availability. So that goes into the design of the sites, which means very small physical real estate in and around the sites, generally.

“These have been designed with no backup power considerations unless it’s at switch centres, hubs, and data centres. That’s where you’d see some redundancy in power. That’s true for ourselves and the other market participants, Vodacom and Telkom.”

BusinessTech Africa understands that the raging power outages cost MTN R695m, according to estimates from its 2022 annual results.

“On the other side is the example of Nigeria, which has 17,000 sites. It was designed with the view that there is only 5% of power from the grid; 95% of the power has to come from other sources, particularly diesel generators,” he added.

“So the Nigeria network has already been designed to take into consideration that every site requires a configuration of diesel generator and/or batteries for backup power.

“Obviously SA grid power has fallen below 90%, so the network availability has fallen below 90% because we’ve moved to heightened levels of load-shedding, materially above stage 4. This really impacts network availability, the ability of batteries to recharge.”