Last week, I argued that MTN’s decision to reacquire tower infrastructure through its acquisition of IHS Towers looked like a quiet corporate admission.
For years, telecom operators treated towers as assets that could be separated from the business. Then they spent billions buying them back.
My research years ago on Zambia’s Road Development Agency taught me that organisations often discover too late that what they classify as peripheral is actually critical. Once control is lost, reclaiming it becomes expensive.
At first glance, MTN’s move validated that lesson exactly. Then another development caught my attention.
At almost the same time MTN was pulling infrastructure back in house, MTN Zambia announced successful testing of Direct-to-Cell satellite technology in partnership with Starlink.
That changed the conversation. Not because towers are disappearing but because the assumptions behind towers may be.
The Technology Above The Towers
For decades, mobile connectivity rested on one straightforward principle that your phone connected to the nearest tower. Coverage was determined by the number, location, and quality of those towers. The entire telecom industry was built on that reality.
Direct-to-Cell technology introduces a different possibility. Instead of connecting to a terrestrial tower, compatible devices communicate directly with satellites in low Earth orbit.
The significance is not that towers become obsolete overnight. The significance is that connectivity may no longer depend exclusively on towers.
That distinction matters more than most telco executives are acknowledging.
Blackberry did not die because touchscreens were invented. It died because it kept optimizing the keyboard while the industry quietly renegotiated what a phone was for.
The product survived the initial disruption. The assumption behind it did not.
The Real Question Is Not Technology
Many readers expected me to frame this as a battle between MTN and Starlink. I think that misses the more important story.
The real issue is timing.
- Newspaper companies saw digital media coming. They continued investing heavily in physical distribution.
- Retail chains understood e-commerce was growing. They kept expanding physical stores at the same pace.
- Video rental companies watched streaming emerge. They could not determine when their own model stopped being dominant.
In each case, the failure was not a lack of awareness. The failure was timing. The disruption was visible. The trigger point was not.
That is why strategic transitions are so difficult. Leaders are rarely choosing between a good option and a bad one. More often, they are choosing between two futures that both appear entirely plausible and both are generating revenue while the choice is being delayed.
MTN’s Strategic Tension
This is what makes MTN such a compelling case right now. The company is simultaneously executing two strategies that point in opposite directions.
One says “control the infrastructure, own the assets, strengthen the foundation”. The other says “partner with emerging technology, experiment aggressively, and prepare for a future where connectivity increasingly arrives from the sky”.
Individually, both decisions are defensible. Strategically, they create a leadership dilemma that a well worded strategy document will not solve.
At what point does experimentation become commitment?
At what point does optionality become indecision?
At what point does waiting become more expensive than choosing?
MTN’s board is not facing a bad strategy. They may be facing a well reasoned delay which, in the wrong market conditions, produces identical outcomes to a bad strategy.
The Invisible Expiry Date
Every strategic decision carries an expiry date that does not appear on any dashboard.
Act before that date and you risk looking premature, more like a leader who abandoned a model that still had years of value left.
Act after that date and you risk looking reactive like an organisation that protected a position long after the market had quietly moved on.
The best leaders are not those who move first. They are the ones who recognise the moment when enough evidence has shifted to justify commitment and who distinguish that moment from the noise that surrounds it.
That skill does not sit comfortably in a financial model. It lives in judgment, pattern recognition, and the willingness to accept uncertainty as a permanent condition of leadership rather than a problem to be solved before acting.
The Future Ex Question
Perhaps MTN’s tower strategy proves correct and satellite connectivity remains genuinely complementary as a rural supplement rather than a structural replacement.
Perhaps the hybrid model is exactly right, and the tension I am describing resolves itself without requiring a definitive choice.
But the most important lesson is not whether MTN gets this right.
It is that every organisation eventually reaches a point where standing between two futures stops being a strategy and starts being a liability.
The greatest strategic mistakes are not always bad decisions.
Sometimes they are good decisions made too late.
And that may be the most precise question MTN is helping us ask today.
Not whether towers matter, not whether satellites win, but whether leaders can recognize the right moment to move before the future removes the option of choosing.
About the Series: The Future Ex is a LinkedIn newsletter series exploring the ideas, decisions, and dynamics that shape and sometimes shatter the futures that organisations and leaders are trying to build.
Country Operations Manager at SNV with expertise in supply chain management, strategy, and sustainability. Holds an MBA and MSc in Project Management, and authors The Future Ex newsletter, focusing on leadership, systems building, and sustainable impact.
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