The Alliance For Afford
\nable Internet (A4AI) on Tuesday proposed a new affordability target of 1Gigabyte of mobile broadband at two per cent of average monthly income.
\nThis is contained in the A4AI\u2019s 2015-2016 Affordability Report, made available to newsmen in Lagos.
\nIt said that when a basic broadband package was priced at such a level, access would become affordable for all levels of income earners.
\nThe report said that an analysis had shown that the current target of entry-level 500megabytes broadband, priced at 5 per cent or less of Gross National Income (GNI) was woefully inadequate.
\nIt said that driving prices down to two per cent average level would enable large swathes of the population currently priced out of access to get online.
\nAccording to the report, increasing the data allowance to 1GB will allow users to make more meaningful use of the Internet.
\nIt said that it was time to set a more ambitious affordability target.
\nThe report noted that in the countries studied, only once prices drop to two per cent of GNI per capita or below did basic broadband become truly affordable for all income groups.
\n\u201cAs noted earlier, 500MB of data does not allow for meaningful use of the Internet.
\n\u201cIt is time to bring the standard by which we measure our progress on \u2018affordability\u2019 more in line with the reality of modern data usage.
\n\u201cA 500MB mobile broadband plan for use over the course of a month, equivalent to about 16MB of data per day, is limiting.
\n\u201cWe therefore, propose a new definition of \u2018affordable Internet\u2019 as a 1GB mobile, prepaid broadband plan, priced at two per cent or less of average monthly income.
\n\u201cThis \u20181 for 2\u2019 target should be adopted as the new threshold for affordability,\u2019\u2019 it said.
\nThe report said that as the data requirements of applications continually increased, so too did the need for larger data packages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Alliance For Afford able Internet (A4AI) on Tuesday proposed a new affordability target of 1Gigabyte of mobile broadband at two per cent of average monthly income. This is contained in the A4AI\u2019s 2015-2016 Affordability Report, made available to newsmen in Lagos. It said that when a basic broadband package was priced at such a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-icttelecom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=124128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=124128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=124128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetidenewsonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=124128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}