CTO/05
2026
ASK CENERVA
The Expert View: Has the mobile market quietly topped out? A RECURRING COLUMN ON THE QUESTIONS THE CONNECTIVITY FIELD WOULD RATHER NOT ASK. READER QUESTIONS WELCOME FOR FUTURE EDITIONS.
The mobile industry deserves enormous credit. Over thirty years it has connected billions of people and reshaped economies, and nowhere more dramatically than in the developing world. In Nigeria, telecommunications contributed a barely measurable fraction of national GDP in 1999, when the country had around 400,000 fixed lines. Today the sector contributes double figures. As someone who grew up in Central Africa, I do not take that revolution lightly. It changed lives, including the lives of people in my own community. Which makes the next observation harder to say. The mobile market, as currently structured, is reaching its commercial limit, and we should plan accordingly rather than wait for it to do something it cannot. The clue is in how operators talk among themselves. One chief executive described his strategy as targeting the 40 per cent of customers who generate 80 per cent of revenue. That is a rational commercial position. It is also a quiet admission that the remaining customers, the poorest and most rural, are unprofitable to serve and will therefore not be served by the market alone. The Africa Group of Six[1] puts a figure on the consequence: 60 per cent of people living within mobile coverage, around 710 million across sub- Saharan Africa, do not subscribe, mainly because they cannot afford a handset. The network reaches them. The economics do not. We have seen this pattern before. The fixed telecoms industry topped out decades ago with line penetration below 3 per cent across most developing countries, and it took mobile to leap over that ceiling. The risk now is assuming that the next mobile generation, or a constellation of satellites, will repeat the trick. Expecting the same industry that has not closed the gap to suddenly close it with 5G is, I would suggest, more hope than strategy.
[1] A coalition of African mobile network operators (Airtel, Axian Telecom, Ethio Telecom, MTN, Orange, and Vodacom)
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