Telecom
IHS Plans More African Phone Tower Deals
IHS, telecoms Infrastructure Company, hopes to agree up to three transmitter tower deals in Africa this year and increase the size of its portfolio nearly seven-fold within the next four years.
Lagos-listed IHS owns about 3 100 base stations, or towers that transmit mobile phone signals, and manages a further 2 000 sites for telecoms operators in Africa including South Africa’s MTN, India’s Bharti Airtel and Etisalat Nigeria.
Operators in Africa, which often struggle with higher running costs and lower revenue per user than other regions, try to reduce expenditure by pooling or selling their transmitter towers.
They can this do via tower-sharing deals, but selling towers to specialists such as IHS is more popular, with these firms also leasing new-build towers to multiple operators.
IHS’s towers are in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, plus Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Sudan and South Sudan and the company is looking at acquisitions in another six countries on the continent, Issam Darwish, chief executive told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.
“Hopefully we can do another 2-3 this year,” said Darwish, adding these were likely to be in West or East Africa. “We plan to own 20,000 sites within the next four years.”
Darwish said he expects the next big growth driver in the region to be an expansion of Internet access via mobile networks, provided governments free up the required radio spectrum.
“Data demand is going to surprise and explode beyond expectations, we just have to get the regulators to provide operators with enough spectrum,” said Darwish.
Other factors IHS considers before deciding whether to enter a country include population, economic growth, mobile penetration and the number of mobile operators, he said.
Nigeria is the mainstay for IHS, which owns about 1,300 sites in its domestic market, of which 900 are operational and 400 under construction, with a further 500 to be built within the next year. These new towers will provide network coverage to about 7 million Nigerians currently out of reach, IHS estimates.
Nigeria’s mobile penetration was 59 percent in 2011 and though this is steadily rising, the country is in the bottom quartile globally.
The lack of a reliable electricity supply is one of the biggest constraints, with about 95 percent of Nigeria’s 24,000 telecom towers run on generators rather than taking power supply from the country’s electricity grid.
“Operators haven’t even invested in connecting to the grid because it was so unreliable,” said Darwish.
These towers consume about $540 million of diesel annually, while total fuel cost when delivery and other factors are included is about $750 million, he estimates.
This led IHS to launch an efficiency drive that Darwish said would halve its diesel consumption by April 2014 by installing more advanced generators and revamping its supply chain.
“We started in Nigeria a year ago because it’s our biggest operation and now that we know what to do we started with Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Sudan,” said Darwish.
On-grid electricity powers 60-80 percent of sites in Cameroon and Ivory Coast, he said.
A tenth of the company’s sites in Nigeria have been switched to a hybrid of solar and generator power, cutting diesel consumption at these sites by up to 70 percent.
Solar-only sites are favoured in rural areas with low consumption where delivering diesel is more expensive.
Clydestone Ghana Plc has filed a writ of summons and statement of claim against MTN Ghana, MTN Group Limited and Mobile Money Fintech Limited, alleging unauthorized use of its intellectual property.
The company announced the court action at the Ghana Stock Exchange, confirming proceedings in the Commercial Division of the High Court of Ghana.
The case relates to work commissioned in 2007 that Clydestone alleges was later used without authorisation or compensation.
Clydestone said the claim involves proprietary intellectual property, confidential commercial information and operational methodology developed during the engagement. The company is seeking declarations, damages and equitable remedies.
In a statement, Clydestone said MTN Ghana engaged it in 2007 to develop a commercial and operational framework for a mobile money business.
“The work was developed and delivered by the company’s founder and Group CEO, Paul Jacquaye, and included a full mobile money ecosystem covering the commercial model, operational architecture, implementation methodology and business case.”
Clydestone said the work was commissioned on the understanding that a non-disclosure agreement and memorandum of understanding would be signed.
It alleges these agreements were not finalised despite repeated requests.
The company further alleges MTN Ghana later used its proprietary work and methodology without authorisation or compensation, including in MTN Mobile Money Ghana and other markets.
Clydestone said the alleged use has continued since the launch of MTN Mobile Money Ghana in 2009.
“The wrongful use of that work has been ongoing since 2009. What has changed is the availability of independently verifiable information that documents its scale and commercial significance,” the company said.
It cited the GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026 and MTN Ghana’s 2025 annual report as evidence of the platform’s scale.
According to Clydestone, the reports show approximately 19.3 million active users and annual revenue of about GHS 6.0 billion ($516m).
The company said it reviewed its records following these publications and concluded there were sufficient grounds to initiate legal proceedings.
It added that it has received no payment or acknowledgement for the work since December 2007, and that pre-action correspondence in 2026 received no substantive response.
“The Board of Directors has unanimously authorised the commencement of these proceedings,” the company said.
Jacquaye said: “This case is about accountability for commissioned intellectual property.
“When independent publications in 2025 and 2026 revealed the scale of the mobile money business, we reviewed all documentation relating to the original engagement and concluded these proceedings were necessary.”
MTN Group Limited, named as a defendant, had not commented at the time of publication.
In a development that underscores the fragile state of Nigeria’s telecommunications grid, an incident of infrastructure vandalism in Delta State has severely disrupted network connectivity, leaving thousands of subscribers stranded.
The breach, where a robber attacked the sites, occurred at an IHS-managed telecom node in the ASB region on July 8, 2026, immediately knocking 33 base stations offline across 2G, 3G, and 4G spectrums.
The situation in the region escalated drastically by morning when a separate fibre-optic cable cut severed primary transmission lines. Because the compromised node serves as a critical fibre convergence point, the secondary fibre cut triggered a cascading failure.
This secondary disruption ballooned the number of dark sites from 33 to 103, temporarily paralysing digital communications, banking, and commerce in the affected communities.
Industry sources reveal that the financial and logistical toll of such incidents is becoming unsustainable for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).
Currently, network providers are utilising 20 per cent more spare parts than initially budgeted for the fiscal year.
This unpredictable depletion of technical reserves has stripped operators of their supply buffers, making inventory management and financial forecasting increasingly difficult for telecom executives.
Consequently, engineering teams have been forced to cannibalise materials originally designated for network expansion and new site rollouts just to perform emergency restorations on the damaged sites.
This diversion of resources significantly delays the rollout of new infrastructure, stifling the nation’s broader broadband penetration targets and stalling anticipated revenue generation for the telecom companies.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) recently noted an average of 1,744 weekly attacks on telecom infrastructure nationwide, including over 1,100 fibre cuts.
As operators endure protracted back-and-forth negotiations with insurance firms to cover these sudden hardware losses, stakeholders are intensifying calls for the strict enforcement of the Federal Government’s recent designation of telecom assets as Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII) to safeguard Quality of Service (QoS).
Viral rumors about a “Tesla Pi Phone” a new phone, being developed by Elon Musk, CEO and largest shareholder of Tesla and SpaceX, are entirely fake.
AI Generated Tesla Pi Phone and Elon Musk
Instead, the tech giant said on Monday it has filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission for permission to deploy the constellation by 2028.
It said the system would provide voice, messaging, data and emergency services.
A quick fact-check revealed that Tesla Inc. has never manufactured, developed, or released a smartphone.
Videos and articles claiming a release (often priced between $150 and $800 with solar charging or satellite-only connections) rely on AI-generated concept art and recycled internet hoaxes dating back to 2021.
Musk has only mentioned a phone in hypothetical remarks, stating Tesla would build one only if major app stores completely blocked or censored essential apps like X (formerly Twitter).
On Monday however, his company said that “Amazon looks forward to delivering on the promise of D2D [direct-to-device] connectivity, including to the millions of people living, travelling and working in places beyond the reach of existing networks today,”
The filing is the first step from Amazon into satellite mobile connections, which has until now been dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink service.
Musk’s group has signed partnerships with existing operators such as T-Mobile US and the UK’s Virgin Media O2 to provide phone services for customers where their conventional networks do not reach.
Starlink operates across more than 150 countries, offering high-speed internet connections through its constellation of satellites.
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