Mobile internet adoption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo surged 40% to 28.9 million subscribers, according to the country’s telecoms regulator.
Ecofin Agency reported, the Regulatory Authority for Post and Telecommunications of Congo (ARPTC) detailed the growth in Q3 2023, was compared to Q3 2020 when the DRC recorded 20.7 million mobile internet users.
The DRC has a population of 75.6 million people and is regarded as a greenfield for operators due to its size. In 2013, the country only had 1.4 million subscribers.
A reason was not provided by ARPTC for the three-year growth. But the data point aligned with mobile phone users, this figure grew from 39.9 million to 56.1 million in the same period.
Data traffic surged from 43.3 billion megabytes in the third quarter of 2020 to 182.2 billion megabytes by the third quarter of 2023. Average monthly data usage grew from 751.95 megabytes to 2,028.97 megabytes.
The ITU announced the DRC has a low mobile penetration rate at 20.4% when compared to the African average of 40%.