You can (not) just retire poor internet

Updates from African infosec

Author

CybAfrique Media
August 01, 2026

CybAfriqué is a space for news and analysis on cyber, data, and information security on the African continent.

HIGHLIGHTS

You can (not) just retire poor internet

Internet connection is a big deal, and many African countries are still working out a strong, stable, and relatively cheap internet connection. 

Last week, we looked at Algeria and Kenya’s push for IPv6. This week, the attention is on Rwanda’s call to retire 2G and 3G mobile networks on 30 June 2027 and December 2028, pending a readiness review. The Ministry of ICT and Innovation (MINICT) and the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA) say running four generations of network technology side by side has become expensive, spectrum-hungry, and increasingly pointless when 4G and 5G already reach nearly the entire country.

This could go right. It could also go wrong. South Africa has been trying to sunset 2G and 3G since 2023. The original target was 2G off by mid-2024 and 3G by March 2025. Both dates have slipped. The government pushed the deadline to December 2027, then scrapped the deadline altogether in mid-2025, handing the decision back to operators. Regulator data showed South African smartphone users were still spending up to 10% of their time on legacy networks.

In Australia, when Telstra and Optus switched off 3G in October 2024, government estimates put the number of affected devices at roughly one million, including EFTPOS terminals, security systems, and, most alarmingly, medical alert pendants and pacemakers still dependent on 3G. 

Singapore, which shut down 2G in April 2017 when only 1.6% of its subscribers, around 132,000 people, were still on the network, largely mandated operator-funded handset upgrades and banned the sale of new 2G-only devices well in advance. Even then, when Singapore moved to sunset 3G in 2024, sociologists and NGOs warned that the remaining 100,000 or so subscribers, disproportionately migrant workers and low-income residents, still needed direct support to avoid being priced out of connectivity entirely.

GSMA Intelligence, which tracks this globally, projected 131 network sunsets by 2030, with 61 of those happening in 2025 alone, concentrated in markets with technology-neutral spectrum licensing that lets operators repurpose the freed 900MHz, 1800MHz, and 2100MHz bands for 4G and 5G capacity (GSMA). Sub-Saharan Africa is conspicuously behind that curve. As of early 2024, no African country had actually completed a 2G or 3G sunset, and GSMA's own analysts describe the region's transition as necessarily more gradual and selective than what's happened in Europe or Asia.

RURA's own Q1 2026 data shows 8.56 million SIM cards linked to active mobile money accounts and nearly 196,000 active mobile money agent SIM cards, most of them running USSD, a protocol built for 2G. Any USSD service that hasn't migrated to an app or 4G-native channel by the cutoff date risks being locked out. Rwanda's own regulator data shows the migration away from 2G is not moving as fast as the policy needs it to. As of March 2026, 3.37 million active subscriptions were still on EDGE (2G), 1.31 million on 3G, and 5.98 million on 4G, out of 10.66 million mobile internet subscriptions total. Roughly 44% of Rwanda's mobile internet subscribers were still on 2G or 3G a year and a half before the 3G switch-off date. 

But technology transitions that get brute-forced by policy tend to produce exponential jumps. When KTRN launched commercial 4G LTE service in Kigali in November 2014, coverage stood at just 17% of the population by the end of that year. It reached 26% in 2015, 55% by the end of 2016, and had hit 95%, effectively the entire country, by mid-2018, a jump from near-zero to near-universal in under four years, and the first nationwide LTE build completed anywhere in Africa.

But the KTRN story is also a warning about the limits of infrastructure alone. By February 2015, three months after launch, the shiny new 4G network had all of 1,000 subscribers. Coverage outran adoption by years, because the pricing was aimed at a market that couldn't afford it, and KT's own executives publicly blamed slow government uptake and policy delays for the gap.

According to an article published by Rest of the World, it shows a roundup of 61 countries, ranging from the U.S. and Brazil to South Africa, India, and China, that have either planned or initiated the process to shut down 2G networks. 

The cybercrime craze continues

Zambia and South Sudan have begun enforcing their cybercrime laws. They are the latest in a trend weaponising cybercrime legislation to legalise digital control and suppress online expression that we’ve written about before. Since 2010, dozens of African journalists and political dissidents have been arrested under these laws across 16 of the 17 countries surveyed. Nigerian authorities have arrested the most, coming at over 25 documented journalist prosecutions under its Cybercrimes Act alone and coinciding with investigative reporting on government corruption, fund diversion, and state accountability.

At least eight other countries, including Senegal, Ghana, Morocco, DRC, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Angola, are still discussing, drafting, or waiting to enforce dedicated cybercrime laws, with several relying on emergency decrees to police speech in the interim. 

FEATURES

HEADLINE

ACROSS THE WORLD

See you next week.

Reply

or to participate.