Spectrum landscape: five trends to watch in 2023

Africa has expanded mobile broadband coverage significantly, but a substantial connectivity gap remains. This report examines how spectrum availability, pricing and licensing conditions affect operators’ ability to expand coverage, improve network quality and support digital adoption. It provides a comprehensive assessment of Africa’s current spectrum policy and licensing landscape, highlighting key challenges around spectrum assignments, pricing, licence obligations, technology neutrality, spectrum roadmaps and licence duration.

The current spectrum landscape is more dynamic than ever before. The ecosystem today must contend with new spectrum allocation and deployment models, new enterprise competition for spectrum resources, and new demands on existing 2G and 3G spectrum resources. This quarterly series leverages the GSMA Intelligence Spectrum Navigator tool to identify key trends and insights.

This quarterly series leverages GSMA Intelligence data on network sunsets to identify the key trends and understand the future. The report outlines the latest developments in network sunsets. The data provided here covers network sunsets by year, technology and region. The report also spotlights the momentum in 2G/3G network sunsets in the context of total active 2G/3G networks globally.