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Enzo Scarcella has witnessed a remarkable transformation in the telecommunications industry over his 30-year career. As he puts it, he has seen everything from ‘flogging minutes of voice to a world of data through fibre’.
Scarcella joined MTN in 1994, just days after the South African network's official launch. One of his early tasks as an assistant project manager was to help introduce "value-added services" – premium recorded content that attracted premium rates per minute. These so-called VASs could offer stock-market or horseracing tips, tax advice, help on how to quit smoking or lose weight, and provide horoscopes and restaurant reviews, for a minimum of R2.50 a minute.
Enzo also worked on creating “fast dial” for the Yellow Pages – a service in terms of which callers phoning the classified directory service could be connected to their plumber or electrician of choice – for an extra 50c.
Those services were just two of the many ways MTN – and its competitor – sought to extract extra value from a service that, for many years, was almost exclusively about voice.
Fast forward to 2024 and Enzo is the MTN Group Executive: Group Consumer and even he marvels at how data has exploded – and how MTN has driven that explosion not only in South Africa but across the continent.
‘In 2018 we had 40% 4G coverage; today it’s 80%,’ Enzo says. ‘Then there were 90 million smartphones on the network; today it’s 183 million. In 2024 we have 300 million customers and half are active data users. In 2018 the average user used 2.1 GB of data; the figure today is 8.6 GB.’
Helping to drive the data explosion, Enzo says, has been the sharp and consistent drop in data charges – from US$1.40/GB half a decade ago to just 40c/GB.
Reducing the cost of accessing the Internet and the plethora of data services hasn’t been achieved just by slashing prices, Enzo points out. Fuelling the data boom have been numerous carefully planned interventions including the launch of low-cost feature phones and smartphones, device subsidies and soft, often unsecured loans. MTN has also brought to market innovative data bundles for the likes of YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp. It has worked extensively with partners and the channel to understand how and why people access the Internet – and then making it not only possible but easy and affordable for them to do so. All the while investing billions in the technology and networks that make using data possible and faster, for more and more people.
Now Enzo and multiple MTN teams are working on his next big thing – bringing fibre to an additional 4 to 5 million homes for the first time by 2033. Already MTN is hard at work realising this goal (‘we can create another 50% of MTN’, Enzo says) in countries including Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Uganda. It aims to do this at scale, delivering unlimited home Internet for US$20 to US$25 a month.
‘Imagine the possibilities. What we’re doing, essentially, is closing the division between access to information. With a US$30 or US$40 smartphone, anyone on our network can have access to the same knowledge as someone at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],’ Enzo says.
