Every afternoon we were in Umnghazi (Port St Johns, South Africa), the local teenagers would come and sit on this sand dune to use the resort’s wifi. We could hear that they were watching YouTube videos and football.
When the big cellphone boom happened, all the major communication companies (cellphone and network providers) ignored South Africa, thinking that Africa was too poor to be a viable market.
Turns out that the majority of South Africans (and probably the rest of sub-Saharan Africas as well) did not have access to landlines,so being able to have connectivity via mobile phones was a huge boon. If you had a mobile phone with a pay-as-you-go card, you were able to speak to prospective employers, call the doctor, run a company. The lack of access to landlines was,in most cases, not a money problem, but an infrastructure one. As the price of mobile phones dropped, ownership shot up.
Local companies that did get in early (such as MTN) made huge strides into the rest of Africa before the international market figured out that there was a market. Nowadays several African countries have almost 100% cellphone ownership, meaning that almost everyone who lives there has a phone. For example, eSwatini – formerly Swaziland – has 94% ownership.
Internet access is way lower though. According to Afrobarometer, the average rate of cell phone ownership on the continent, is 84% out of 34 countries surveyed but the internet access rate is 45%.
A little while back, I was watching a Japanese dating show on Netflix and the contestants were traveling across several African countries by bus and they were showing how vital mobile phones were because they were very often used to transfer money from different accounts. So one person could be working in one country and then transfer some of the money earned to someone in their family. I thought this was really interesting and such a life saver for so many people. Mobile phones are so much more practical than landlines or laptops.
I actually don’t know anyone with a landline these days. Not even my mother.