Region in Focus: Sub-Saharan Africa, Q3 2025

The GSMA Intelligence Mobile Data Deck offers a fast track to all the essential data you need to know, with key mobile metrics in one easy-to-use deck of charts. The forecasts to 2030 include connections by region and technology generation, smartphone connections and adoption, and mobile operator revenue.

The perennial challenge for operators is being able to sell to consumers and businesses based on more than just speeds and latencies, which are eventually competed away. This analysis looks at a selection of 5G revenue models used by operators in the consumer and enterprise domains. What has worked? What hasn’t? Each model is compared according to a common template to give a view of the business impact.

Monetisation is the key objective in 2026 for telcos on APIs (as with other business lines) and their distribution partners, with the implications for go-to-market strategies being different depending on the API and buyer. It is important to quantify the commercial potential and buying likelihood of APIs across different sectors of the economy to accurately orient supply. To that end, GSMA Intelligence has developed the Open Gateway Demand Index, which aggregates a range of metrics to help understand where demand lies and the commercial opportunity for network APIs in each sector.