About 200 million people live in areas without mobile broadband coverage in Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan Africa countries, according to a new report by GSMA.
In its ‘The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2022’ report, the global body representing telecommunication across the world disclosed that the Sub-Saharan African region remains the region with the largest mobile broadband coverage and usage gaps.
It stated that as a result of continuing investment in mobile broadband in the region, the coverage gap reduced from 19 per cent in 2020 to 17 per cent at the end of 2021.
It said, “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.
“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.”
According to the London based organization, mobile internet usage reached 55 per cent of the global population in 2021. It revealed that by the end of 2021, 4.3 billion people were using mobile Internet. It stated the almost 300 million growth in mobile Internet adoption was driven by people living in low – and middle-income countries in 2021.
GSMA further said that about 95 per cent of the world’s population is now covered by a mobile broadband network. It explained that at the end of 2021, only 5 per cent (400 million) of the world’s population live in areas without mobile broadband.
It added. “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.”
The global telco body also revealed that 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 falling 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.
