200m rural dwellers in Africa experience the largest gaps in coverage
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
About 200 million rural dwellers in Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries lack access to mobile broadband coverage, according to the latest release from the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA).
“The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2022” report by GSMA reiterated Sub-Saharan Africa has the largest gaps in mobile broadband coverage and usage gaps.
However, the gap reduced from 19 per cent in 2020 to 17 per cent in 2021 as a result of increasing investment in mobile broadband in the region.
“Almost 200 million people live in areas without mobile broadband coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa, but this figure masks important differences at the sub-regional level,” the report said.
“In Central Africa, 39 per cent of the population (60 million) remains outside the reach of a mobile broadband network, while this stands at 16 per cent in Western Africa (64 million), 13 per cent in Eastern Africa (45 million), and 12 per cent in Southern Africa (26 million).
“In other regions, coverage deployment broadly stalled in 2021; at the same time, the percentage of the population using mobile internet increased, thus reducing the usage gap.
“In these regions, the increase in mobile Internet use in the last year comes from people previously covered by mobile broadband but not using it.
“In 2021, South Asia and East Asia and Pacific had the biggest increases in mobile internet adoption, which accounted for 64 per cent of new mobile subscribers globally because of the large population sizes of both regions.”
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95% of global population covered by mobile broadband network
GSMA, which is based in London, said:
- Mobile Internet usage reached 55 per cent of the global population in 2021.
- Up to 4.3 billion people were using mobile Internet by the end of 2021.
- Almost 300 million growth in mobile Internet adoption was driven by people living in low-and middle-income countries in 2021.
- About 95 per cent of the world’s population is now covered by a mobile broadband network, the GSMA said, per reporting by The PUNCH.
Only 5 per cent (400 million) of the world’s population lived in areas without mobile broadband by the end of 2021.
“At the end of 2021, there were 3.2 billion people living within the footprint of a mobile broadband network but not using mobile internet.
“With network expansion slowing, mobile internet adoption has begun to outpace increases in mobile broadband coverage.
“After remaining relatively unchanged between 2014 and 2019, the share of the population living within the footprint of a mobile broadband network but not using mobile internet (i.e. the usage gap) decreased from 45 per cent in 2019 to 40 per cent in 2021.
“However, the usage gap remains substantial and is almost eight times the size of the coverage gap.”
GSMA disclosed global mobile data traffic per user grew from 6.2GB per month to 8.2 GB per month in 2021.
Data costs also fell in 2021, with 1 GB of data dropping to 2 per cent of monthly income in 56 per cent of low-and middle-income countries but affordability is still a problem with the average handset representing 54 per cent of monthly income.