Since commercial deployment began in 2019, 5G coverage has increased to reach 51 per cent of the world population in 2024. However, the distribution is very uneven: 84 per cent of people in high-income countries are covered, but only 4 per cent in low-income countries.
At the region level, Europe boasts the highest 5G coverage, at 72 per cent of the population, followed by the Americas (63 per cent) and the Asia-Pacific region (62 per cent). Coverage is much lower in the Arab States (13 per cent), the CIS (12 per cent) and Africa (11 per cent).
Where 5G is not available yet, 4G remains a very good alternative, available to 92 per cent of the world population. In low-income countries, however, 4G only reaches about half the population (52 per cent), and 3G remains an important technology for connecting to the Internet.
3G or better is now available to 96 per cent of the world population. Bridging the “coverage gap”, that is, covering the remaining four per cent that lie beyond the reach of a mobile broadband signal, is proving difficult: since crossing the 90 per cent threshold in 2018, global 3G coverage has increased by only five percentage points. The largest coverage gap is in Africa, where 14 per cent of the population still does not have access to a mobile broadband network and therefore cannot access the Internet.
LDCs and LLDCs, having 15 and 14 per cent of their population, respectively, beyond the reach of mobile broadband, are falling short of target 9.c of Sustainable Development Goal 9: to “significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020.”
Urban areas are generally prioritized for infrastructure roll-out, being more densely populated and hence more profitable. This explains why globally 67 per cent of people living in urban areas have access to a 5G network, compared with only 29 per cent of those living in rural areas, a difference of almost 40 percentage points. The urban-rural gap affects all regions, ranging between 18 percentage points in the CIS region and 41 percentage points in the Asia-Pacific region.
In high-income countries, 90 per cent of the urban population has access to a 5G network, compared with only 58 percent of the rural population. In low-income countries, 5G is essentially unavailable in rural areas, and reaches only 10 percent of the urban population.
Older technologies are available in all urban areas in the world. 4G networks cover 99 per cent of urban areas in the world, while coverage drops to 82 per cent in rural areas. But global averages conceal vast disparities: for instance, only 30 per cent of rural inhabitants in low-income countries have 4G coverage.
Areas without any mobile broadband coverage whatsoever (i.e. where the best available standard is 2G or lower) are only found in rural regions. The proportion of the rural population affected by this coverage gap ranges from 2 per cent in Europe to 25 per cent in Africa. In LLDCs, 21 per cent of the rural population are not covered, while in LDCs it is 24 per cent. The biggest coverage gap is in rural areas of SIDS, where fully 39 per cent of the population are without any mobile broadband access whatsoever.