The Wholesale Broadband Market: Open Access, Pricing Battles, and the Future of Competition
September 3rd 2026
Africa’s broadband market has been measured by how much fiber has been laid, how many towers have been erected, and how many households have been connected to a network. However, wholesale economics are now determining who builds the network, who is allowed to sell capacity, who benefits from infrastructure, and at what price.
The Structural Logic of Open Access
At its core, the wholesale broadband model rests on a simple separation: the entity that owns physical infrastructure—fiber, ducts, towers—is distinct from the retail providers who sell connectivity to end users. A neutral wholesale layer sits between the two, publishing standardized tariffs and onboarding internet service providers on equal terms without competing against them directly. This structure is what earns the trust of smaller operators who would otherwise be locked out by vertically integrated incumbents.
Before fiber reaches homes and businesses, the business model must make sense. The commercial models that have proven most successful separate passive infrastructure ownership from active service delivery. This creates two complementary revenue streams: wholesale access fees from ISPs and mobile operators, and long-term anchor tenancy agreements with schools, healthcare facilities, and government institutions. Together, these predictable income sources improve investment certainty, reduce risk from the outset, and create a more sustainable foundation for network expansion.
Regulators across the continent have taken notice.
Open-access fiber models are gaining ground as regulators promote wholesale frameworks specifically designed to cut infrastructure duplication and lower the cost of backhaul, recognizing that requiring every operator to build parallel networks is both capital-inefficient and, in many markets, simply unaffordable.
In Nigeria and Uganda, MTN and Airtel Africa have gone as far as signing agreements to share radio access and fiber infrastructure directly, an approach the International Finance Corporation estimates could lift network operator cash flows by as much as 31%.
Government-Backed Wholesale Infrastructure
Public investment has played a parallel role in building out neutral wholesale capacity. South Africa’s Broadband Infraco SOC was established specifically to deliver wholesale fiber connectivity to underserved areas, while Kenya’s National Optic Fiber Backbone Infrastructure project has connected 47 counties on a similar open-access basis.
These government-backed backbones are designed to function less like commercial competitors and more like utilities, extending capacity into regions where the economics wouldn’t otherwise justify private investment.
An underexploited variant of this model is now emerging from an unexpected direction: power utilities. Electricity transmission companies across East, West, and Southern Africa already operate extensive fiber networks, laid alongside high-voltage lines for grid monitoring and communications, known as OPGW and ADSS fiber. In principle, a rule of thumb applied elsewhere (Chattanooga and Longmont in the United States) suggests utilities could reserve roughly 30% of that fiber capacity for internal operations and release the remaining 70% commercially.
However, in practice, in Africa, most of this capacity sits unused. Where utilities do sell capacity, it is typically limited to dark fiber sold to Tier-1 operators, leaving smaller ISPs and community networks without access, a gap rooted less in technical constraints than in the governance divide between energy and telecom regulators, who operate under different mandates, different incentives, and different definitions of success.
Pricing Battles at the Subsea Layer
Wholesale dynamics don’t begin at the metro level; they start even earlier, at the submarine cable landing stations that determine how much international bandwidth costs before it ever reaches a domestic network.
For Africa, submarine cables are the primary determinant of wholesale bandwidth pricing, network resilience, and ultimately the commercial viability of every downstream service built on top of them. Where landing stations remain gatekept by a single state-owned operator, as in Djibouti, despite hosting one of the continent’s highest concentrations of cable landings, the price benefits of new subsea capacity tend to get captured at the top of the value chain rather than passed down to consumers.
Newer cable systems are attempting to correct this structurally. The 2Africa system was designed from the outset as a fully open-access network, allowing operators and ISPs to purchase capacity directly rather than depending on a single intermediary.
A New Competitive Layer: Satellite Wholesale
The wholesale model is now extending beyond terrestrial fiber into orbit. LEO satellite operators are following the same partnership logic that fiber networks pioneered, offering wholesale capacity that terrestrial operators can resell through existing retail channels.
Vodacom and MTN have already entered wholesale agreements with Starlink in Kenya and Nigeria respectively, a model that lets terrestrial operators capture revenue from underserved segments without directly competing against the satellite provider, while extending broadband-quality connectivity into regions where terrestrial backhaul remains prohibitively expensive to build.
The Road to Genuine Competition
None of these structural shifts—open-access fiber, shared radio infrastructure, utility fiber, subsea capacity reform, or satellite wholesale—function in isolation; together, they represent a broader recalibration of how African telecom markets define competition.
This is not merely a race to build the most infrastructure, but a contest over who is allowed fair, non-discriminatory access to infrastructure that already exists.
The markets that get this balance right, pairing continued private investment with genuine open-access enforcement, are likely to see broadband prices fall fastest and competition intensify most.
Source: Telecoms Review Africa
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