Telecommunications group MTN is commercializing a suite of AI-driven Internet-of-Things solutions for the agricultural sector, while identifying private network infrastructure as a key enabler of wider digital agriculture adoption in rural areas.
Speaking at this year’s Nampo Harvest Day near Bothaville in the Free State, MTN South Africa GM for Connected Enterprise Solutions Sudipto Moitra said the company had moved beyond proof-of-concept deployments and was bringing commercially deployable solutions to market across the agricultural value chain.
At the core of the strategy is MTN Connected Things, the company’s communication management platform, which acts as an aggregation layer for its IoT solutions. The platform currently supports more than six million active SIM cards in South Africa and provides the foundation for MTN’s industry-specific digital offerings. “This platform becomes the glue. This platform becomes where all the aggregation of various solutions happen,” Moitra said.
Among the company’s commercial offerings is MTN Connected Fleet, an AI-driven fleet management solution developed in partnership with Power Fleet. The system incorporates driver behaviour monitoring, proactive route tracking and pool management capabilities aimed at improving fleet safety and operational efficiency. “It is taking the data and making sure the driver behaviours are being addressed in a proactive rather than reactive way,” Moitra said.
MTN is also expanding its smart utility solutions, which include smart electricity and water metering systems supplied through National Treasury’s RT29-2024 framework. Moitra said the company had spent the past two years partnering with government to roll out the systems across municipalities, including financially distressed local authorities. He said the technology was particularly relevant for agriculture given ongoing water and electricity supply challenges.
The company has also completed several paid proof-of-concept projects involving livestock tracking and cattle lifecycle monitoring for government departments and private-sector clients. However, Moitra acknowledged that commercial scalability remains a challenge — particularly when it comes to making livestock monitoring affordable for smaller farming communities. “It is not whether the technology works, but can a farming community monitor every single cattle at the price point they deserve to, and that is the maturity curve that we are in,” he said.
Connectivity infrastructure remains a critical part of MTN’s agricultural IoT strategy, particularly in remote farming regions where conventional GSM coverage may be insufficient. To address that, the company is developing private network architectures tailored for agricultural operations, building on the evolution from legacy 2G and 3G systems toward newer 5G-enabled technologies.
“If the connectivity is not right, there can be a big transformation opportunity to make sure we create a private network architecture that gives the agriculture industry the ability to use all the modern IoT technologies,” Moitra said.
