Ernest Paul has spent 28 years at MTN in all manner of technical roles and is now a general manager for governance, quality and service creation. In 1996, he remembers, telcos had very limited abilities, and MTN in South Africa had to use Telkom to connect its base stations to its network switching centres.

“When 2G technology was launched, it literally just had the ability to make a phone call. Stuff like SMS and caller line identity only came years later. The type of equipment was very basic, and would only allow six simultaneous calls on one sector of a site with one transmitter,” he laughs.