The United Nations Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development aims to make broadband prices affordable in developing countries by 2025, affordability being defined as the availability of broadband access at a price of less than two per cent of the monthly gross national income (GNI) per capita.
With only four years left to reach that target, prices remain prohibitive in many parts of the world. For mobile broadband, just under one-half of the economies for which ITU collected data in 2020 are still short of the target (84 out of 195), and for fixed broadband, it is more than one-half (56 per cent).
In the LDCs, while the median price for entry-level broadband has been declining, it remains beyond the means of the average consumer in all but 4 of the 43 LDCs for which data could be obtained. For fixed broadband, among the 33 countries for which data are available, only one has met the two per cent target.
For more information, refer to the ITU publication, “Measuring digital development: ICT price trends 2020”.