The United Nations’ agenda to bring Internet access to everyone by 2030 is destined to fail, according to a new book by a former senior telecommunications regulator.
The Connectivity Crisis: Half the World Left Behind, published by Strathclyde Academic Media points out that in addition to 2.6 billion people offline in 2025, an additional 2 billion people are technically ‘online’ but barely use the Internet meaningfully – accessing it perhaps once every three months, according to the ITU’s current definition of ‘meaningful connectivity’. Combined, this means more than half of humanity remains digitally excluded.
“We’re lying to ourselves,” said Professor H Sama Nwana, Cenerva partner, former Group Director at Ofcom UK and the book’s author. “The telecommunications industry has failed over 1.2 billion people who cannot or do not make basic voice calls regularly as of 2024 due to usage gap challenges – and this is some thirty-three years after the first 2G network and GSM call was made in Finland.
“Expecting the same industry to suddenly connect everyone to the Internet by 2030 with 5G is sheer fantasy.”
Nwana fears the mobile telecoms industry as we know it today is ‘topping out’, just as the fixed telecoms industry topped out with fixed line tele-densities1 below 3% in most developing countries. He notes, for example, that Nigeria had only 400,000 fixed lines in 1999.
Professor Nwana cites a revealing comment from a major mobile operator CEO who admitted his company targets “40 per cent of customers who generate 80 per cent of revenue”, effectively abandoning the poorest as unprofitable.
Using Pareto’s principle (80/20), he maintains that 86 per cent of the work to achieve global meaningful connectivity still lies ahead, suggesting the UN, the Broadband Commission and others must set more realistic Internet connectivity targets.
Instead of doubling down on expensive 5G and satellite projects, the book proposes controversial alternatives:
The book calls on developing countries’ leaders to establish a Global Digital Divide Leadership Coordination Forum and abandon unrealistic timelines in favour of evidence-based strategies.
“This is a personal and honest book,” said Professor Nwana, who was born in Cameroon. “It means no harm to stakeholders trying to address connectivity challenges, but we must stop pretending current approaches will work.”
Drawing on case studies from India, Brazil, Papua New Guinea, and Malawi, the book concludes with five practical actions for policymakers, including an urgent review and redefinition of what meaningful connectivity should mean.
Available to purchase from Amazon
Professor Nwana is a Full Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde, former senior regulator at Ofcom UK, and Managing Partner of Cenerva, with a heavily cited academic record and consulting and training experiences with the World Bank, Meta, Microsoft, telecoms operators, and Regulators across Africa, the Caribbean and Asia.
He is also the author of the 500-page Demystifying Economic Regulation – A Practitioner’s Guide: Theory, Methods & Practice – published in 2024 and The Internet Value Chain & the Digital Economy: Insight and Guidance on Digital Economy Policy and Regulation – published in 2022.
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