Why Some of the World's Most Expensive Mobile Data Is in Africa

Mobile internet access across much of Africa carries a price tag that stands out globally, and not in a good way. Cable.co.uk, a UK-based comparison site that has run a recurring Worldwide Mobile Data Pricing study since 2018, has repeatedly found some of the priciest data on Earth concentrated on the continent, a finding that recurs across multiple editions of the research rather than appearing as a one-off anomaly.

The study’s late-2018 edition, which compared 6,313 mobile data plans across 230 countries collected between late October and late November of that year, found Zimbabwe to be the single most expensive country in the world for 1GB of mobile data, at $75.20, a figure that outstripped every other market Cable.co.uk measured globally. Equatorial Guinea followed close behind as the second-priciest market in Africa at $65.83 per gigabyte, with Saint Helena and Djibouti rounding out the continent’s most expensive tier. Later editions of the same study, run in subsequent years, have continued to find several African nations, Equatorial Guinea prominent among them, ranked among the world’s costliest data markets, indicating a persistent rather than temporary pattern.

What drives the disparity has less to do with a country’s overall wealth than with the structure of its telecommunications market. Analysts who study the sector point to limited competition among mobile network operators as the central factor: smaller markets with only one or two carriers, often including a dominant state-linked or historically monopolistic provider, face little competitive pressure to lower prices, while the fixed costs of building and maintaining network infrastructure across large, sometimes sparsely populated territories get passed on to a comparatively small subscriber base. Landlocked or island nations with limited undersea cable connectivity face additional cost pressures tied to how their data traffic physically reaches the rest of the internet.

The picture is not uniform across the continent, and that unevenness is itself instructive. Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole has trended toward some of the highest average data prices in the world in Cable.co.uk’s cross-year comparisons, yet several African markets, including ones with more competitive carrier landscapes, rank among the world’s cheapest for the same metric, a split that reinforces the same underlying explanation: it is market structure and infrastructure investment, not geography or national income alone, that determines whether a country’s mobile users pay a few cents or dozens of dollars for the same gigabyte of data.