MTN dropped a bombshell this week, shocking investors with a massive 31.5% fall in voice revenue in the last quarter. But we should expect nothing less, as traditional voice becomes an irrelevance in a data-led world.

By pure coincidence, in almost the same breath, MTN completed South Africa’s first trial of 5.5G mobile data connectivity. Demonstrated during the Africa Tech Festival in Cape Town on Tuesday, the trial saw MTN reach mobile data speeds of 8.6 Gigabits per second. That’s not going to come to your cellphone very fast: most handsets support the previous 4G and 5G generations of connectivity. However, the same was said of 5G when the first demonstrations of that technology took place just five years ago, in 2019...

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