MTN's H1 Results Say Fibre Is Overtaking Wireless - But Not Necessarily in South Africa

MTN Group released its results for the six months to 30 June 2026 on 24 August 2026. The headline home-broadband finding, as reported by TelecomLead and TechAfrica News, is that fibre-to-the-home is now expanding materially faster than fixed wireless access (FWA) across MTN's home broadband business - pulling fibre's share of the group's active home customer base up, with MTN Nigeria specifically named as running fibre rollout and connections "materially ahead of plan."

For South Africa, the same results disclose a narrower set of figures: R3.3 billion of capex on an IFRS 16 basis during H1 2026 (R2.6 billion excluding leases), postpaid data consumption up 32% to 32.3GB and prepaid data consumption up 23.6% to 4.9GB, and a line describing home connectivity products Shesh@5G and MTN AirFibre as continuing "a strong growth trajectory" across both fixed wireless and fibre. No fibre-versus-FWA split, and no updated South Africa connections total, is given.

It's an easy mistake to make: MTN Group is the same company that told this site's readers in June 2026 it wants 30% of South Africa's home internet market by 2030, so a group-wide "fibre is now growing faster than wireless" headline reads, at a glance, like an update to that South Africa story. It isn't - at least not one MTN has actually confirmed. The 58.2% active-home-customer growth figure spans every market MTN operates in, and the market called out by name for leading the fibre shift is Nigeria, not South Africa.

None of this means the South Africa business is doing badly - the R3.3bn capex figure and the "strong growth trajectory" language both point the same direction as the group story. It means the specific, quotable claim - fibre overtaking wireless - hasn't actually been confirmed for South Africa, and readers deserve that distinction rather than a group figure quietly repackaged as a local one.

MTN South Africa doesn't publish a fibre-vs-FWA split, but it has given an overall home connections figure twice before - which makes the silence in this result worth showing rather than filling in.

The gap in that third row is the point. A company that gave a specific connections count twice in the space of a year and then switched to qualitative language ("strong growth trajectory") for its next result hasn't necessarily slowed down - but it also hasn't given anyone outside the company a way to check the claim. Until MTN South Africa publishes an updated number or a technology split, the most honest thing to say is that home broadband is growing, by MTN's own account, and that the rate and mix are not independently verifiable from this result.

This site's whole reason for tracking numbers like MTN's home base, rather than just repeating whichever headline travels furthest, is that group-level telecoms results get quoted out of their geographic context constantly - and South Africa is usually the market readers here actually care about. The same caution applies to backbone and financing stories that sound South Africa-specific but aren't: our look at EAAIF's $50 million commitment to Liquid's pan-African fibre backbone made the same distinction between a continent-wide financing event and what it actually changes for a South African fibre customer's line.

It's also worth being direct about what would resolve this properly: MTN South Africa disclosing an updated connections total, split by fibre and fixed wireless, in its next results or trading update. Until then, treat "MTN's fibre is overtaking its wireless in South Africa" as an unconfirmed extrapolation from a group-wide number - not a fact this site, or MTN's own South African disclosure, currently supports.