A new policy brief from ITU and the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), finds that
high costs for Internet access relative to income remain one of the main barriers to the
use of information and communication technology (ICT) services worldwide. Taking
income differences into account, a mobile broadband subscription with at least 1.5
gigabytes (GB) of data costs around four times more in developing countries than in
developed ones.
“The affordability of ICT services 2020" analyses five categories, namely mobile
broadband, fixed broadband, mobile data and voice low-usage, mobile data and voice
high-usage, and mobile cellular low usage. Service prices in all five categories
continued a slow but steady decline over the past year.
Developing countries were the main drivers of this global price decline. However, a
pronounced affordability gap remains between developed and developing countries.
While 4G networks cover areas with about 85 per cent of the world's population, nearly
half of those people were still offline in 2020.
“The declining price trend for mobile and fixed broadband is encouraging, but we need
to strengthen our efforts to lower the prices in developing countries," said Houlin Zhao,
ITU Secretary-General. “While the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the digital
transformation, we need to connect all people to schooling, work, health, business and
government services. We build up the infrastructure for a better future, not only for
challenging times."
According to the UN Broadband Commission on Sustainable Development's Target 2
for 2025, entry-level broadband service in developing countries should not cost more
than 2 per cent of monthly Gross National Income (GNI) per capita. The global median
price for entry-level mobile-broadband services in 2020 fell within that target, at 1.7 per
cent. However, the median price for entry-level fixed-broadband (i.e. at least 5 GB)
services was considerably above the target, at 2.9 per cent of GNI per capita.
Broadband in developing countries had a median price of 2.5 per cent of GNI per capita,
compared with only 0.6 per cent in developed countries, the brief shows. Over the past
year, the number of economies that met the 2 per cent affordability target increased by
six: out of the 190 economies covered in the report, 106 have achieved the target, while
84 economies have prices above the target.
Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director of ITU's Telecommunication Development Bureau,
said: “ICT services in the majority of least developed countries (LDCs) remain
prohibitively expensive, even for entry-level users."
Despite the median price decline in the past year, the mobile broadband data-only
basket was unaffordable in 39 out of 43 LDCs, while the fixed-broadband basket was
unaffordable in 32 out of the 33 LDCs for which data are available.
For a fixed-broadband service, the median price in developed countries stood at 1.2 per
cent of monthly GNI per capita, while in developing countries the median price was
much higher, at 4.7 per cent. Out of the 178 economies for which these data were
collected, the price was below 2 per cent in 67 economies and above this threshold in
the other 111.
“This data makes clear that we need to rapidly accelerate progress to remove cost
barriers to Internet services," said Sonia Jorge, Executive Director at A4AI. “The
pandemic not only underlines the critical importance of Internet access in today's world
but has laid bare the scale of digital inequality that remains. We need ambitious,
coordinated action to make affordable, meaningful connectivity available to everyone,
with efforts targeted at those least likely to be online, including poor and
rural populations, women, and people living in the least developed countries. As the
world becomes increasingly digital, the need to expand connectivity to everyone
becomes ever more urgent."
Fixed-broadband services, the most expensive category studied, saw the least change
in the past year. This apparent price stability, however, does not reflect recent, and
varying, quality improvements. In developed economies, the median speed of entry-
level connections increased from 30 to 40 megabits per second (Mbit/s) last year. In
developing countries, it only increased from 3 to 5 Mbit/s.
Africa witnessed the biggest price decreases in all five categories in relative terms,
although its median prices remain well above world prices. In general, regional
disparities are less pronounced than the gap between economies with different income
levels.
Note to editors
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Alliance for Affordable
Internet (A4AI) have partnered to collect data and analyse global and regional trends in
affordability and pricing for a set of five ICT price categories, covering different
technologies, including mobile voice and mobile and fixed broadband. Details on the
methodology are available on the ITU website.
The latest data were collected in June 2020, while the source for historical price data
are previous ITU data collections. The brief focuses on ICT prices expressed as a
percentage of monthly gross national income per capita (GNI p.c.) to show
“affordability", or ease of purchasing an ICT service, relative to consumer income.
Country groups in the report are benchmarked using the median price of categories.
The distribution of ICT prices in many world regions is highly skewed, with very high
values observed in several economies. Representing country group values by the
median (rather than, for example, the average, which is intuitively easier to
communicate) dampens the impact of outliers on differences across time and space.