South Africa’s connectivity debate has always been about the network: spectrum auctions, 4G and 5G deployments, fibre kilometres, tower coverage and load-shedding resilience.
The unspoken assumption is that if we can just get the signal to the person, the digital economy will follow. Except, it doesn’t. The bottleneck has shifted from the network to the device in consumers’ pockets.
Communications regulator Icasa freed up new Wi-Fi spectrum years ago, opening the door to faster, less congested home internet connections. Yet much of that capacity is stranded because the routers in people’s homes and the handsets in their hands are too old to use it. We cleared the runway; the aircraft can’t take off.
Walk through any taxi rank or township street and look at the phones. Most are sub-R1,500 Android devices with a few gigabytes of storage, a sliver of RAM and a processor that wheezes through a single banking app. Storage fills up within months, so users are forced to choose which apps to keep — WhatsApp stays; the rest are usually dispensable.
Screens crack and stay cracked for years, because a replacement costs more than the phone is worth. And because these devices run old, unpatched versions of Android that stopped receiving security updates long ago, they are a soft target for malware and fraud.
This is not a fringe problem. MTN told investors this week that even with smartphone penetration of around 70% — the highest in its markets — it still has between 4-million and 5-million 2G and 3G devices on its South African network. It also conceded that even where it has coverage, a large “usage gap” remains: people who can reach the internet but barely use it. Coverage, in other words, is no longer the constraint. Capability is.
Everything we are now bolting onto the smartphone assumes a capable device. The banks are herding customers out of branches and onto apps. The operators are turning mobile money into “super apps”. The government wants a biometric digital ID and a suite of online services. The AI assistants everyone is so excited about live behind app downloads and constant updates. Every one of these advances raises the floor of what a phone must be able to do — and every time we raise that floor, we leave behind the millions whose devices can’t keep up.
The single cheapest intervention to expand real digital inclusion — putting a decent, secure smartphone in more hands — gets little attention
The cruel irony in this is that the people most in need of cheap data, digital banking and e-government services are the ones holding the phones least able to deliver them. We are designing a digital economy for devices that a large share of the population does not own.
The security dimension makes it worse. We are asking people to put their identity, their money and their grant payments onto handsets that no longer receive security patches. As we digitise identity and payments, we are concentrating the highest-value targets on the least-defended devices. A data breach at a credit bureau makes headlines; the slow, invisible harvesting of credentials from millions of unpatched phones does not. Yet it absolutely should.
Device affordability has barely registered as a policy issue — though, to be fair, it is something that communications minister Solly Malatsi has put on the agenda through his lobbying for reductions in luxury taxes on basic phones. He’s already won a small concession in this regard from the National Treasury, a scrapping of the 9% ad valorem duty on phones costing less than R2,500 — and he’d do well to keep pursuing further tax breaks.
South Africa has expended enormous political energy arguing over spectrum and BEE conditions and who may roam on whose network. Meanwhile, the single cheapest intervention to expand real digital inclusion — putting a decent, secure smartphone in more hands — gets little attention. Import duties and VAT still pad the price of entry-level phones.
The lesson for an industry that loves big infrastructure announcements is this: we have largely solved the network and barely touched the device. Until we treat the smartphone as the piece of national infrastructure it has become — taxing it lightly, financing it sensibly and securing it as seriously as we secure the network — every new spectrum band and every fibre rollout will deliver diminishing returns.
The digital divide in South Africa is no longer a line on a coverage map. It is the difference between a phone that can interact with the digital economy and one that cannot. And for millions, that divide is sitting in their hand right now, behind a cracked screen.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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