The Rural coverage Conundrum in emerging markets, bridging the digital divide, the opportunity & what rich online companies can do to reduce the coverage and Affordability Gap
Africa is the next growth frontier for major investments in Infrastructure, in Agriculture and so many other sectors. But as Technology evolves towards cloud and data centre economics, and the race for 5G connectivity intensifies - there is still 750M unconnected subscribers, with the vast number, 300M in Subsaharan Africa and 220M South Asia according to the GSMA State Of mobile Internet connectivity Report 2019. The root cause is that there is no justifiable business case for telcos to deploy coverage infrastructure, especially since their investors require high returns in the mid to longterm. One of the solutions to this conundrum lies elsewhere - enter Online companies Online companies can be defined as those that conduct their businesses online by using the power of the internet. They can be termed as over the Top(OTT) companies. Some Examples for context are Google, Netflix, Alibaba, Zoom, Microsoft and so on. These companies make their money largely off already connected broadb