By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 14

The overhaul is sold as strategy, but for ordinary users it stands or falls on whether the network stops dropping.

For the people who pay Telecom Namibia’s bills, the June 2026 overhaul answers a more immediate question than corporate strategy: will the connection hold. Months of interrupted fixed and mobile service framed the reset, and the company paired it with a plan to modernise the network end to end rather than patch it.

The technology detail matters because it sets user expectations. The operator has put dates against the work, which turns a vague promise of improvement into something customers can hold it to.

From ten to a hundred gigabits

At the core of the rebuild is raw capacity. Telecom Namibia is lifting its national backbone from multiple 10 Gbps links to multiple 100 Gbps links, expanding international gateways and adding redundancy across key routes. The company expects users to notice greater stability in the main population centres and fewer large outages from around October 2026, with backbone and gateway upgrades due by December 2026.

That timeline is the useful part. A tenfold jump in backbone capacity is the difference between a network that congests under load and one that carries streaming, video calls and business traffic without stalling. The further phases of national modernisation are set to run into June 2027.

Capacity is the quiet fix: ten times the backbone is what stops the network buckling at peak.

Retiring the old radios

On the mobile side the work is a generational upgrade. Older 2G and 3G sites are being lifted to 4G and 4.5G, core mobile systems for voice, SMS and data are being modernised, and the operator is moving to a converged fixed-mobile core built with the Spanish integrator SATEC. Its infrastructure arm has added and upgraded base stations through 2026, with more sites planned by year-end.

For a user, that converged core is what lets a call, a message and a data session run off one modern platform rather than several ageing ones. It is unglamorous engineering, but it is the layer that decides whether coverage feels current or dated.

Moving users off 2G and 3G is less about speed records than about a network that behaves like this decade’s.

Why it broke in the first place

The rebuild only makes sense against what went wrong. Outages through early 2026 came from ageing hardware, unstable international routes and a sharp rise in copper theft and vandalism, with more than 80 incidents recorded between February and May. Each cut fibre or stripped cable took real customers offline, sometimes for days.

That is why the plan pairs new equipment with hardened, monitored routes and a push on fibre in the worst-hit areas. Resilience, not headline speed, is the metric that will decide whether users feel a difference.

The network failed on theft and age as much as on technology – so the fix has to harden, not just upgrade.

The service-company ambition

Behind the hardware sits a shift in what Telecom Namibia wants to be. The overhaul talks of new products and of becoming a service-oriented digital company rather than a pipe-owner, positioning it for a market where data, cloud and applications matter more than the line itself. For consumers, that should mean more than a steadier signal – it should mean services worth paying for.

The caution, as of mid-2026, is that all of this is promised and dated, not delivered. The improvements customers can verify begin in October, and the wider modernisation runs on for another year.

A better signal is the floor; new digital services are the return users should watch for next.

For a household or a business weighing whether to stay with Telecom Namibia or move to a rival, the overhaul offers a testable bargain: measurable network improvement from October 2026 and a fuller rebuild through mid-2027. The decision is whether to wait for those dates to land or to switch now – and whether the promised digital services arrive to justify staying.

Sources: The Namibian; Telecom Namibia modernisation disrupts network (Connecting Africa); Telecom Namibia network modernisation programme (TechAfrica News)