The New Last Mile: Why African Broadband is Moving Outdoors

Fibre-to-the-home remains the benchmark for fixed broadband, offering the uncapped capacity and latency required as household data consumption surges. But extending fibre to every doorstep presents a severe civil engineering bottleneck: trenching costs, municipal permits, rights-of-way, and complex last-mile drops make capital recovery exceptionally slow outside dense urban corridors. This bottleneck has created a widening mismatch between surging consumer demand and the geographic footprint whe