Ghana’s Ministry of Communications, Digital Technology and Innovations, Samuel Nartey George, announced this week that Cabinet has approved a shift to a competitive national bidding process for spectrum allocation.
The announcement came at a workshop on Spectrum Auction Design and Pricing in Accra, held alongside the 15th anniversary of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications and organised with the GSM Association (GSMA).
Why the Old System Failed
Spectrum is radio frequency — the invisible infrastructure that carries mobile calls and data. Governments control it like land, parcelling it out to telecoms operators. In Ghana, that process has historically lacked transparency, producing outcomes that neither maximised state returns nor incentivised operators to build out networks aggressively.
The consequences are visible. In 2015, the NCA conducted a spectrum auction in the 800MHz band, but set the minimum price at $67.5 million per lot — so high that only MTN purchased a single lot, leaving the rest of Ghana’s digital dividend spectrum unsold.
The sector it left behind is fragile. Ghana’s telecom market, which once had six competitive firms, is now down to three: MTN, Telecel, and AT Ghana. MTN has quietly expanded from 61% market share in early 2022 to nearly 79% today — a level of dominance that both the NCA and the Communications Ministry have publicly flagged as a concern.
The Pitch for Competitive Bidding
Communications Minister Samuel Nartey George says the new framework will fix the fundamental problems. Spectrum allocations, he told the workshop, will now follow a competitive national bidding process designed to ensure fairness, enhance value for the state, and promote meaningful investment in network deployment.
The shift is part of a broader 10-year national spectrum strategy currently being finalised by the National Communications Authority.
But the minister was careful to frame this as more than a revenue exercise. He explicitly cautioned against auction designs that chase short-term financial returns at the expense of long-term sector health. “Auctions designed only for revenue can suppress investment, delay coverage and fail to serve consumers effectively,” he said — a pointed acknowledgment of exactly what happened in 2015.
The new regime will be complemented by a wholesale framework, keeping multiple access pathways open and allowing a wider range of players — including smaller operators and private networks — to participate in next-generation rollouts.
The 5G Stakes
In February, Cabinet approved a decision to remove an existing exclusivity arrangement for 5G deployment and open spectrum allocation to competitive bidding, with the government targeting 70% population coverage of 5G by Ghana’s 70th independence anniversary in 2027.
That is an aggressive target. NGIC, the infrastructure company previously granted a ten-year monopoly on 5G, had completed only 16 of the 50 required sites in Accra and Kumasi as of mid-2025. Blowing up exclusivity and opening the market to competition is the government’s bet that more players will accelerate what a single concessionaire has struggled to deliver.
The government plans to auction 5G spectrum in the 3.5 GHz and 26 GHz bands during 2026, which would allow additional operators or private networks to enter the market.
The Hard Part: Designing the Auction
Announcing a competitive bidding regime is the easy part. Designing one that actually works is considerably harder. Minister George used the workshop to task industry stakeholders with providing technical input on auction structure, reserve pricing, and rollout obligations — the three levers that determine whether a spectrum auction produces genuine competition or merely expensive licences that operators sit on.
He called for deliberate anti-speculation measures in the auction design — provisions that would ensure spectrum goes to operators with credible deployment plans, particularly in underserved communities, rather than to entities treating frequencies as financial assets.
The Acting Director-General of the NCA, Rev. Ing. Edmund Yirenkyi Fianko, reinforced the point: the success of spectrum licensing should not be measured by how many licences get signed, but by how much infrastructure actually gets built.
Source: Ghana News Agency
