Showing posts with label MBB. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MBB. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

How Many People are Still Unconnected in 2023 and Why?

I hear in many presentations that half the world is still unconnected so we need a solution XYZ. In this post I will explore how many people are really unconnected and why.

GSMA produces an annual report called "The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity Report". The latest issue from Nov 2022 explains the number of people that are still unconnected because of coverage gap or the usage gap. Quoting from the report:

(click to expand the image)

By the end of 2021, 4.3 billion people were using mobile internet, representing 55% of the world’s population, up from 31% in 2014 (see Figure 1). This translates into almost 300 million people coming online in the past year. Most of the people who started using mobile internet in 2021 came from LMICs (low and middle-income countries), where 94% of the unconnected population live.

By the end of 2021, the share of the world’s population living in areas without mobile broadband coverage stood at 5%, meaning that 400 million people are still not covered by a mobile broadband network. Since 2018, this coverage gap has reduced by only 1 pp a year (see Figure 1), highlighting how the remaining uncovered communities – which are predominantly rural, poor and sparsely populated – are the most challenging to reach in a financially sustainable manner. For example, in least developed countries (LDCs) almost 30% of people living in rural areas are still not covered by a mobile broadband network.

A much larger proportion of the unconnected live in areas already covered by mobile broadband networks. By the end of 2021, 40% of the world’s population (3.2 billion people) were living within the footprint of a mobile broadband network but not using mobile internet. While this usage gap remained relatively unchanged between 2014 and 2019, it declined by 300 million people (or 5 pp) over the past two years. However, the usage gap remains substantial and is now almost eight times the size of the coverage gap. It is worth noting that these numbers are for the total population, some of whom would never be expected to use the internet (e.g. young infants). Indeed, taking adults (18 years old and above) only, the usage gap stands at 25%, a much smaller though still significant gap.

The report further expands the reasons for usage gap as shown below:

(click to enlarge)

As can be seen, the reasons have been grouped in 5 major categories as follows:

  • Literacy and digital skills
    • I do not know how to access the internet on a mobile phone
    • I have difficulties with reading and writing
    • I find it difficult to use a mobile in general (calling, texting or mobile internet)
    • I do not have time to learn how to use the internet on a mobile phone
    • There is nobody to teach or help me to use mobile internet
  • Relevance
    • There is not enough in my own language on the internet
    • I do not find the internet relevant enough for me (not useful or not interesting)
  • Affordability
    • The cost of buying a mobile phone that can access the internet is too high for me
    • The cost of buying data to use the internet on my mobile is too high for me
  • Safety and security
    • I am concerned that I would receive unwanted contact from people online (e.g. scam emails or unwanted messages)
    • I am concerned that it might expose myself or my family to harmful content
    • I am concerned that my identity or other private information will be stolen or misused
  • Access
    • There is limited or no coverage to access the internet in my area
    • Using the internet on my mobile phone is too slow (e.g. connection speeds)
    • My family does not approve of me using the internet on a mobile phone
    • It is hard to find a mobile phone agent or representative to buy mobile internet data from
    • Using the internet on my mobile phone uses too much battery
    • I cannot borrow or pay to use internet on another person’s phone
    • It is hard to find somewhere to buy a mobile phone which is able to connect to the internet

There are many reports of blackmail and extortion cases in India that are linked to mobile phones and internet. You can read about them here and here. These also discourage a lot of people to embrace smartphones, especially women.  

Although women account for close to half the world's population, according to a UN report on gender digital divide, 259 million fewer women have access to the Internet than men in 2022. 

I hope that the next time presenters are talking about the number of unconnected people, they put things in context and mention the connectivity and the usage gap. 

Finally, here is a webinar recording from M4D discussing the latest trends in global connectivity from The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity Report 2022:

Related Posts

Monday, April 9, 2018

Digital Africa: Building the Internet Ecosystem


Got an opportunity recently to hear about the connectivity progress, challenges and issues in Africa. Agree that Africa is a very large continent with many different countries in different stages of development but it was nevertheless interesting to look at a high level picture on the progress of connectivity in the continent. The presentation by iDate Digiworld is embedded below.



Slides available from techUK website here.

Related Post:

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Case Study: Migrating from WiMAX to TD-LTE



I was glad to hear this case study by Mike Stacey where they have a WiMAX network already deployed and are in process of moving to TD-LTE. Along with the technical issues there are also business and customer issues that need to be taken into account while doing this technology swap. Surprisingly 3.5GHz is also not a very popular band because there are very few deployments in this spectrum. On the other hand, most of the companies worldwide that have been able to get their hands on this spectrum, generally got a big chunk (60-100MHz) so they would be able to do CA easily (bar the technical issues of Intra-band interference).

Anyway, the presentation is embedded below. Hope you find it useful. If you know of similar experiences, please feel free to add them in the comments.


Saturday, November 23, 2013

Bandwidth is not the answer – it’s stationarity


Martin Geddes did an interesting presentation in Future of Broadband workshop. The ITU has the following write-up on that workshop

Eye-opening, evangelical and extremely well attended: this afternoon’s Future of Broadband workshop was all about exploding established concepts on how telcos should go about improving both customer experience and their bottom line.
Ranking broadband in terms of speed is the standard approach, but speed is not the only thing that matters in this business, according to Martin Geddes of Geddes Consulting, running the workshop in conjunction with Neill Davies of Predictable Network Solutions.  He illustrated his point with a series of examples drawn from customers accessing broadband at different speeds – but with unexpectedly different experiences.
Slower broadband, whether over cable, satellite or fibre, in many cases offered a better quality of customer experience than the faster variant. Why? Variability, or rather lack of variability, is the key. A stable service, even it is slower, enables POTS-quality VoiP, whereas a highly-variable, faster service delivers a less satisfactory customer experience – and, by definition, an unhappier customer.
“The hidden secret of networking is that the network delivers loss and delay between packets,” said Geddes, “There is more to broadband than speed or capacity: with many customers wanting lots of different things at once, we also need an absence of variability, and that is what we call stationarity.”
Looked at from the network operator side, there are two key areas to consider: what is driving the cost of broadband and pushing capex sky high, and how to retain and increase your customer base to bring in the revenue. The answers, it seems, are not immediately obvious.
To start with, the knee-jerk telco reaction of pouring capex into infrastructure upgrades and increased capacity is simply not the way to ensure good quality of service and happy customers.  Demand for broadband is highly elastic, expanding to consume whatever supply is on offer and creating a “jack-hammer effect” – which produces variability. Paradoxically, increased investment in bandwidth may be behind that very poor service which leads to customer churn and the panicked assumption that another upgrade is necessary – an “investment cycle of doom.”
This is a deep systemic problem in the industry investment machine. Rushing to premature upgrades masks the real core issue, that of quality of service.  The presenters demonstrated this in heaven-hell model, where full network capacity and happy customers is telco heaven – and the converse, unhappy customers and underused network, is of course telco hell.  Getting the balance is not easy, as increasing local networks pushes down the quality of experience for applications with strong stationarity requirements – exactly what the customer is after.
For Martin, there is a tiny root cause of this: all current packet-based infrastructure relies on it being idle and keeping queues empty to ensure good quality. So your assets must stay idle to keep your customer. The solution lies in thinking about how to reframe both this problem, and the exact nature of the resource the operators are selling.
“Don’t make packets move for their own sake, but focus on customer experience. Change the resource model,” urged Martin. “Throw away the bandwidth model and thought process.” Efficiently allocating resources to customers is more important than bandwidth. Increase capacity, but only in a very targeted way.  In other words, meet heterogeneous  demand with a differentiated product.
This, then, is how to ensure a future of broadband heaven: understand that quality of experience is a function of loss and delay. Characterize your supply requirements properly. Work out what customers are after, certifying fitness of purpose for a particular, actual customer demand rather than a generalised one-size-fits-all concept. And, in the words of the workshop presenters: “Don’t sell bandwidth – sell differential experiences.”

His presentation is embedded as follows:



Thursday, September 26, 2013

Multi-stream aggregation (MSA): Key technology for future networks


In our recent 5G presentation here, we outlined multi-technology carrier aggregation as one of the technologies for the future networks. Some of the discussions that I had on this topic later on highlighted the following:
  1. This is generally referred to as Multi-stream aggregation (MSA)
  2. We will see this much sooner than 5G, probably from LTE-A Rel-13 onwards 


Huawei have a few documents on this topic. One such document is embedded below and aanother more technical document is available on slideshare here.



Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Wi-Fi & Packet Core (EPC) Integration

Yesterday I wrote a blog post on whether Wi-Fi is the third RAN in the Metrocells blog. Today I am posting this excellent presentation that details how this Wi-Fi integration with EPC will be done.



Monday, July 2, 2012

Right Pricing Mobile Broadband



Note by Dr. KimDelivered this presentation at the Informa's Pricing Mobile Broadband conference 26 & 27th August 2012 in London. While some of the slides are similar to the ones in my Mind Share document you will find new slides and re-worked material giving another twist to Right Pricing Mobile Broadband. Enjoy and should you have any questions/comments just get in touch! Don't be a stranger!

You can also see the old presentation on Right Pricing LTE ... and Mobile Broadband in general here.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Right Pricing LTE ... and Mobile Broadband in general



Note by Dr. Kim: I should emphasize that this presentation really is a Technologist's view on mobile data pricing and not that of a Pricing Professional (whatever that might mean) responsible for pricing today's (maybe even tomorrows) mobile data products.

Monday, April 16, 2012

LTE - THE Mobile Broadband Standard


Saw this logo in one of the 3GPP presentations. Does anyone know if this is an official logo?

Sunday, December 11, 2011

How Mobile Broadband users use their data allowance


Interesting picture of what MBB users use their data allowance on. Interesting to see that Social Networking is far popular in the North America whereas Real-time entertainment is much more popular in APAC. It is understandable that the downstream Real-time entertainment would contain of VOD services like Youtube and Hulu but not sure what Upstream would consist of. 

Friday, October 21, 2011

'Internet Trends' and 'Mobile Internet Trends' by Mary Meeker

Came across this article from InformationWeek based on this presentation by Mary Meeker. Few points to note from the article:

Mobile: Mobile subscriber growth is continuing at a pace that matches the meteoric rise of Internet adoption, a rate that puts other technologies like TV to shame. Meeker cited 35% year-on-year mobile 3G subscriber growth and noted that smartphone shipments have surpassed feature phone shipments in the U.S. and Europe. She also highlighted the explosive growth of iPhone, iPad, and (particularly) Android.

User Interface: Interface matters. "Before Steve Jobs, computers were utilitarian tools for computation," said Meeker. "After Steve, computers became beautiful objects we could use in thousands of ways to aim to make life better." In the wake of the iPhone and the iPad, there's a revolution in the way we interact with computers, through touch and voice, while mobile. "We think the next big things are the things on the sides of your head," said Meeker. "Those would be your ears." She was referring to the innovation seen in voice recognition, sound creation and sharing, and audio interfaces like headphones recently.

America Leads In Mobile Innovation: Despite the general economic doldrums in the U.S., American companies are leading the way toward the mobile era. Made-in-the-USA smartphone operating systems--Android, iOS, and Windows Mobile--have gone from 5% market share in 2005 to 65% today. "The pace of innovation in Silicon Valley may be unprecedented," said Meeker.

Mobile Devices Are Empowering People: Some 85% of people in the world have access to the wireless grid, more than have access to electricity. Over 200 million farmers in India receive payments via mobile devices. Meeker pointed out how instrumental such devices have been during disasters like the March earthquake and tsunami in Japan. "When people look back at this era that we're living in now, they'll say this was the time people got empowered by mobile devices," said Meeker.

The video of her talk is embedded below:



Couple of presentations from her are embedded below:





Sunday, October 16, 2011

Broadband Adoption is Addictive

Click on the image to enlarge

From a presentation by Phillippe Keryer - Alcatel Lucent - BBWF 2011 Keynote Day 2

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Wi-Fi in Public Transport over LTE

Another interesting presentation from the LTE World Summit 2011 on how LTE can be used as a backhaul in the trains to provide passenger WiFi and other services.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

UMTS-LTE in 3.5GHz

There are two new bands: 3.4-3.6 GHz and 3.6-3.8 GHz decided for Broadband Wireless Access, which are already widely available for licensing in Europe. These bands have earlier been allocated to the Fixed Service on a primary basis in Region 1. Furthermore, the 3.4-3.6 GHz band was allocated to the mobile service on a primary basis and identified for IMT at WRC 07.

These bands constitute a substantial amount of spectrum that will be available in many countries in the short term. In Europe (Region 1) both bands can be used so block sizes could be large for any duplex arrangement.

The UMTS-LTE 3500 MHz Technical Report (3GPP TR 37.801) is already available as a study of current plans in the frequency bands 3.4-3.6 GHz and 3.6-3.8 GHz for UMTS and LTE systems. Specification work is due for first publication in March 2011 (TSG#51), with a series of specifications updated or being created.

The technical report is embedded below: