Sam George, Ghana's Minister Of Communication, Digital Technology and Innovations, is widely reported to have set what is described as a firm deadline of June 2025 for the Next Generation Infrastructure Company (NGIC) to launch 5G services in the West African country. But will it be met?
Ghana's government announced in August 2023 that it did not plan to auction 5G spectrum but would establish NGIC, a "neutral shared infrastructure company", to deliver nationwide 4G and 5G services.
In November 2024, NGIC announced its readiness to collaborate with operators and internet service providers (ISPs) to launch 5G services. It apparently claimed that operators MTN Ghana, Airtel Ghana and Telecel would roll out the services to their customers before the end of 2024 in the cities of Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi.
However, the rollout deadlines have been repeatedly postponed. In January 2025 we reported that Sam George’s predecessor, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, said that deploying 5G services depended on operators purchasing the necessary capacity and providing it to their customers. This does not appear to have happened.
A May deadline to deliver 5G services is not going to be met. Sam George has said that if a new deadline of June 2025 is missed, renegotiations will be on the table. At the moment NGIC has an exclusive right to offer 5G services in Ghana for a decade.
It's hard to tell why this has happened. While operators may have been slow to sign up, there don't appear to be a lot of sites available yet. News services say NGIC boasts 16 5G-ready cell sites, with its core network successfully inspected by the National Communications Authority (NCA). However, according to George, NGIC has promised 350 cell sites by June this year, 50 of them 5G-capable, with 200-250 sites focused on Accra and 100-150 sites in Kumasi.
Even if this target is met, 5G demand is not guaranteed. Many sources quote market research company Omdia, which estimates that 8.2 million of MTN Ghana's 29 million subscribers were on 4G at the end of the fourth quarter of 2024 but only 445,000 subscribers of Telecel Ghana's almost 6.5 million subscribers were on 4G in the same period. Many other subscribers are still using 3G.
