CTO/05
2026
Look at where the growth has actually gone. Between 2022 and 2023 roughly 100 million people came online, and the easier connections come first. Each successive hundred million is harder won and more expensive than the last, which is exactly what the flattening adoption curve in the hardest markets shows. Meanwhile the populations that remain offline are growing fastest, particularly across Africa. An industry optimising for its most profitable 40 per cent of customers is behaving entirely rationally, but rational commercial behaviour and universal connectivity are pulling in opposite directions. No amount of waiting reconciles them. It is worth being precise about what topping out does and does not mean. It does not mean the mobile sector will shrink or stop innovating for the customers it already serves well. It means the marginal unconnected user now sits beyond the point where serving them pays, and that the curve bends towards a ceiling rather than towards universal, inclusive coverage. Recognising that early is an advantage. It lets governments and institutions stop pinning the entire strategy on a market
outcome that will not be attained, and start building the policy scaffolding that can reach the people the market has priced out.
If the market has topped out for the poorest-to-serve, the response is not to abandon the market but to stop relying on it exclusively. That means regulatory levers that change the economics: licensing thousands of small local providers as Brazil did, creative use of universal service regulation and funds that actually fund the gap, lower taxes on low-end devices, and shared infrastructure that brings the cost of reaching a rural household within reach. These are policy choices, not technology breakthroughs, and they are available now. So, the question for this column: have we been waiting for a market solution to a problem the market has already told us it will not solve? Send your view for a future edition.
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