By Mohamed Ali - Technology & Digital Economy Commentary
April, 6, 2026 - In 2009, two men sat down to build something. They had no towers. No cables. No network hardware of any kind. They had a laptop, some code, and a small rented office. They did not ask any telecom company for permission. They did not pay any telecom company for access. They simply used the pipes that were already there.
So how did this happen? It happened through a model the industry calls Over-The-Top. OTT for short. The name tells you everything. You build your product on top of existing infrastructure. You use the pipes without owning them. You reach the users without paying for the last mile.
The genius of OTT is not just that it is cheap. It is that the bigger you grow, the more you need the pipes, but the pipes still cost you nothing. Here is a simple way to see it. Someone in Nairobi opens Netflix. They watch a film for two hours. Safaricom earns a few shillings from the data that two-hour stream uses. Netflix earns advertising and subscription revenue that, across all its users worldwide, adds up to billions of dollars every quarter.
Same pipe. Same data. Completely different financial outcome. Safaricom built the road. Netflix opened a cinema on it. Safaricom charges a toll per car. Netflix charges per seat.
And it was not just one company. It was all of them. WhatsApp replaced text messages. Text messages were almost pure profit for telecoms. Every SMS a customer sent used almost no data and cost almost nothing to deliver. The telecom kept most of the fee.
WhatsApp made texting free. The telecom lost that revenue. YouTube replaced pay-per-view television. Zoom replaced conference calling services. Skype replaced international phone calls.
Every one of these apps took a service that telecoms used to earn money from and made it free. Researchers estimated the telecom industry lost close to $479 billion in voice and messaging revenue between 2012 and 2020 because of OTT apps.
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Nearly half a trillion dollars. Gone. And the companies that caused that loss? They kept growing. Meta crossed $1 trillion in value. Google passed $2 trillion. Apple hit $3 trillion.
The app makers built nothing physical. They owe that success to the pipes they rode — pipes they never paid for. Now bring this home to Africa.
Every time a user opens Instagram on an MTN line in Nigeria, the same thing happens. MTN earns a tiny data fee. Meta earns advertising revenue that funds a $1.5 trillion company. Every time someone on Airtel Uganda watches a YouTube video, Airtel earns cents. Google earns dollars.
African telecoms spent billions building networks across some of the hardest terrain on earth. They put up towers in places that had no roads. They brought connectivity to people who had never been connected.
And then the apps showed up. And the value flowed out.
This is part of the story, the next part will answer the question ," Did the telecoms try to stop it? And if they did, what happened when they finally pushed back?"
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