The continent is still low on connectivity, writes<\/p>\n
\u00a0SONNY ARAGBA-AKPORE<\/p>\n
\u00a0Despite the rise in global internet connectivity,\u00a0African countries still wobble on the outskirts of globalization. Paucity of investments,\u00a0high costs of devices and political will may have been some of the reasons for the slow growth.<\/p>\n
\u00a0The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) released its 2024 Facts and Figures in Geneva,\u00a0Switzerland last week with Africa almost occupying the bottom line in connectivity.<\/p>\n
The ITU admits however that universal coverage is still elusive even though the growth in developed economies is high.\u00a0In 2024 ,\u00a05.5 billion people were \u00a0online representing 68 per cent of the world population, compared with 65 per cent just a year earlier.<\/p>\n
\u00a0The year-on-year growth rate is itself increased\u00a0from 2.7 just one year ago to 3.4 per cent this year. \u00a0In high-income countries 93 per cent of the population uses the Internet. This contrasts starkly with the situation in low-income countries, where only 27 per cent of the population is online.<\/p>\n
\u00a0While the yearly growth rate in these economies averages 8.5 per cent in 2024, higher than in any of the other groups or regions, this is not sufficient to close the gap anytime soon.<\/p>\n
\u00a0The average monthly mobile broadband traffic per subscription in high-income countries 16.2 gigabytes (GB) is roughly eight times that in low-income countries with 2GB.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Put differently,\u00a0an average user in a high-income country generates more traffic in just four days than a user in a low-income country does in a whole month.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Though smaller than across income groups, regional disparities are still striking. The average monthly traffic in Africa is 3.1 GB per subscription, less than a quarter of the world average of 13.9 GB or one-sixth that seen in the Commonwealth Independent of States (CIS) with 19.1 GB.<\/p>\n
\u00a0The ITU Facts and Figures show that \u00a0\u201cin 2024 the two connectivity benchmarks, namely the data-only mobile broadband basket and the fixed broadband basket, have become more affordable in all regions of the world and for all income groups.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Globally the median price of the mobile broadband basket, expressed as a percentage of gross national income (GNI) per capita, dropped from 1.3 to 1.1 per cent, while that of the fixed broadband basket dropped from 2.8 to 2.5 per cent.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cNonetheless, lack of affordability continues to be a key barrier to Internet access, particularly in low-income economies. A wide gap persists between high-income economies and the rest of the world, despite small improvements. Compared with the average mobile broadband subscriber in a high-income economy, subscribers in a lower-middle-income economy pay around six times as much of their income for such a basket, while subscribers in a low-income economy pay 19 times as much. A fixed broadband subscription, where one is available, costs the equivalent of nearly a third of the average person\u2019s income in a low-income country.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0The United Nations Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development set an ambitious goal of making broadband in developing countries affordable by 2025.<\/p>\n
Affordability is defined as the availability of broadband access at a price that is less than two per cent of monthly GNI per capita.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Since commercial deployment of fifth generation (5G)\u00a0began in 2019, its coverage has increased to reach 51 per cent of the world population in 2024 ITU figures for 2024 show.<\/p>\n
GSMA puts the figure at 54 % for its 2025 reports indicating a marginal growth of three percent.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cHowever, the distribution is very uneven: 84 per cent of people in high-income countries are covered, but only four per cent in low-income countries.<\/p>\n
\u00a0At the regional level, Europe boasts the highest 5G coverage, at 72 per cent of the population, followed by the Americas (63 per cent) and the Asia-Pacific region (62 per cent). Coverage is much lower in the Arab States (13 per cent), the CIS (12 per cent) and Africa (11 per cent).<\/p>\n
\u00a0But\u00a0where 5G is not available yet, 4G remains a very good alternative, available to 92 per cent of the world population. In low-income countries, however, 4G only reaches about half the population (52 per cent), and 3G remains an important technology for connecting to the Internet.<\/p>\n
\u00a0In reality ,\u00a0Urban areas are generally prioritized for infrastructure roll-out, being more densely populated and hence more profitable to network providers.<\/p>\n
\u00a0This explains why globally 67 per cent of people living in urban areas have access to a 5G network, compared with only 29 per cent of those living in rural areas, a difference of almost 40 percentage points. The urban-rural gap affects all regions, ranging between 18 percentage points in the CIS region and 41 percentage points in the Asia-Pacific region.<\/p>\n
\u00a0In high-income countries, 90 per cent of the urban population has access to a 5G network, compared with only 58 percent of the rural population. In low-income countries, 5G is essentially unavailable in rural areas, and reaches only 10 percent of the urban population.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0Mobile phones are the most common gateway to the Internet, so the prevalence of mobile ownership provides an indication of Internet penetration. \u00a0Furthermore, some people may own more than one mobile phone like in Nigeria. .<\/p>\n
\u00a0In most countries, the percentage of individuals owning a mobile phone is somewhat higher than the percentage of individuals using the Internet.<\/p>\n
\u00a0The Global System of Mobile Communication Association (GSMA) released its yearly report last week too saying that the Fourth-generation (4G) technology has emerged as the most dominant network across the globe, with about 7.6 billion people now enjoying the service.<\/p>\n
\u00a0In its State of Mobile Internet Connectivity report, it also disclosed that 5G now covers more than half of the world\u2019s population accounting for 54%.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) data show that 4G network has reached 50.8 per cent of the population, followed by 2G, which covers 38.6 per cent; 3G, 7.38 \u00a0per cent and 5G, 3.17 per cent in the country.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Three key players are MTN,\u00a0Airtel and GloMobile.<\/p>\n
\u00a0But the coverage is more in urban and semi urban areas where 4G is predominantly concentrated and pockets of 5G. \u201cAlmost 7.6 billion people worldwide now have 4G coverage, equivalent to 93 per cent of the global population. The majority of network investment continues to be in 5G deployments. 5G coverage has now reached more than half the world\u2019s population (54 per cent or 4.4 billion people) with more than 700 million additional people covered in 2024,\u201dGSMA submitted.<\/p>\n
\u00a0On Nigeria,\u00a0GSMA said 78 per cent of rural respondents interviewed during its in-country survey\u00a0are aware of mobile Internet \u00a0but only 39 per cent own an Internet-enabled phone a drop-off of 39 percentage points. This drop-off is also significant for urban respondents but smaller, at 24 percentage points. While there are reports of fast growth of internet around the globe, 5G in Nigeria is still in its early days, mainly serving urban areas and \u00a0those users familiar with the technology,\u00a0desirous of fast speed connectivity and can afford high end devices and data plans.<\/p>\n
\u00a0For \u00a0those who live in major cities and have 5G-capable devices, and can afford higher data costs, 5G is a win win technology but consumes data faster than any other technology.<\/p>\n
Aragba-Akpore is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The continent is still low on connectivity, writes \u00a0SONNY ARAGBA-AKPORE \u00a0Despite the rise in global internet connectivity,\u00a0African countries…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[1638,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-157227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-internet","8":"tag-internet","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}