5G ambition: Could Paratus Namibia beat mobile giants at their own game?

WHEN during an African Tech Roundup Podcast chat I suggest Paratus Namibia's 5G ambitions might threaten mobile carriers, managing director Andrew Hall doesn't deflect. He grins.

- ANDILE MASUKU

"Connectivity is a commodity, prices are going down, you need to make up for that revenue in other spaces," he states plainly with a chuckle.

After over 22 years building networks across Namibia, Hall's experience has led him to conclude that long-term commercial sustainability requires poaching customers from adjacent industries.

His fibre company wants mobile subscribers. Banks want payment customers. Mobile operators want banking clients. The territorial boundaries that once defined the telecoms industry are collapsing.

Namibian market lab

Namibia offers a singular testing ground for this theory. With vast distances between sparse population centres, conventional infrastructure economics barely function. At 825 000 square kilometres with only 2.6 million people scattered across it, Namibia is one of the world's least densely populated countries.

Hall describes the challenges bluntly: "If you drive down the road, you'll see three fibres running next to the road. If you're driving from one town to the other, you'll see two or three towers standing next to each other."

What Hall sees as a suboptimal competitive dynamic among state-owned enterprises and private operators results in what he calls duplicated infrastructure, though he declines to detail whether regulatory requirements or technical considerations might justify the redundancy.

Paratus Namibia has thrived by rejecting the status quo. Instead of competing purely on coverage, they pioneered open access services, allowing smaller ISPs without capital budgets to piggyback on their network.

Whether the move actually enhanced competition as he claims or simply created new revenue streams for Paratus remains unclear, but Hall positions it as a preview of the boundary-crossing strategy now driving their 5G plans.