West Africa’s broadband market is being revitalized thanks to expanded fiber coverage and adoption. However, diverse regulatory and infrastructure strategies are resulting in different performance across the region.
Fiber deployment in West Africa is accelerating, reshaping the fixed broadband market and raising users’ expectations for speed. While Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal have led the way in fiber adoption, Togo and Gabon are emerging as rapid-growth fiber markets thanks to favorable regulatory policies and operators’ investments. Using OoklaSpeedtest®data, this article examines how fiber development translates into improved network quality across the region and identifies where the next opportunities for market development lie.
Key Takeaways:
- West Africa is accelerating fiber expansion, with leading markets scaling coverage while emerging ones lean on regulatory interventions. While Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and Côte d’Ivoire have accelerated fiber rollout and subscriber growth in the last two years, Togo and Gabon are at earlier stages where market development is more dependent on policy decisions.
- Nigeria has the most consistent performance improvement among the six countries, while Côte d’Ivoire is the fastest. Nigeria’s median fixed broadband download speed (excluding satellite) increased 2.55x from 13.50 Mbps in 2023 to 34.47 Mbps in H1 2026, while its median upload speed rose by nearly the same proportion. This shift coincides with a threefold increase in fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) subscribers between end-2024 and June 2026. On the other hand, median download speed reached nearly 61 Mbps in Côte d’Ivoire in H1 2026, while the P10 speed (the slowest 10th percentile) nearly doubled to 11.39 Mbps, and the P90 (90th percentile of fastest samples) grew more slowly, at 16.9%. This data shows that while fiber successfully lifted the baseline for underserved Ivorian users, capacity caps, high costs, or old Wi-Fi CPE limited the speed upside.
- Senegal and Ghana saw strong fiber growth, though different factors drove their performance improvements.Senegal saw median download speeds rise 78% to 38.55 Mbps by mid-2026. This can be attributed to market-dominant Sonatel’s overhaul of residential fiber in February 2026, which simplified tariffs and increased speeds across the board. Ghana also saw a significant jump in upload speeds and a decrease in latency in a single quarter (Q3 2025).
- Togo and Gabon exhibit contrasting performance trajectories, with Togo’s regulatory-led gains outpacing Gabon’s light-touch approach.Togo’s median download speed improved rapidly through early 2025, then plateaued in the 34-38 Mbps range. Gabon has seen slower growth, reaching 42.25 Mbps by mid-2026 but struggling with higher latency.
Diverse regional strategies and constraints shape the pace of fiber developmentin Africa
Mobile remains dominant across Africa, but fixed broadband infrastructure holds a clear technical advantage for high-capacity applications due to uncapped data usage and superior speeds, especially in stationary indoor environments. These characteristics make fixed lines suitable for consumers to access public digital services and enterprises to use cloud and AI services. Specifically, the maturity of the fiber access market (in terms of coverage, adoption, and affordability) is important to economic and social development on the continent as it allows citizens tomaximize the benefits of internet access.
Because Africa has lagged behind other regions in fiber penetration and data usage, local regulators and operators have focused on increasing fixed broadband reach and uptake. In the last four years, fiber investment, in particular, has gathered pace, with sub-regions adopting different strategies:
- North Africais the most developed sub-region, with fiber mainly deployed by incumbent fixed-line operators, withAlgeria and Morocco ahead in FTTP coveragewhileEgypt continues to lead in performance.
- West Africais emerging as a significant hub for fiber investment, with Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire at the forefront of coverage in the sub-region. In contrast, Nigeria and Ghana had more limited rollouts.
- Central and East Africais generally less advanced in FTTP rollouts than in other regions, with Kenya being an exception with significant deployments from multiple operators.
- Southern Africais one of the largest FTTP markets in Africa, withnearly 6.5 million homes passed and 2.6 million homesconnected to fiber thanks to multiple ISPs contributing to the development of an open-access model. Mauritius has the most expansive network with nearly nationwide fiber coverage. In the rest of the region, fiber deployments are often limited to urban high-income areas.
West Africa epitomizes the diversity of the fixed broadband market on the continent
This analysis focuses on the four leading markets for fiber household penetration: Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria, and two emerging markets: Togo and Gabon.
Senegal is the most mature fixed fiber market in Francophone West Africa, with FTTP coverage estimated between 35% and 40% of total country premises, led by incumbent operator Sonatel Group (operating under the Orange brand), which had900,000 households passed by fiberas of April 2026. It also plans to add one million more fiber ports between 2026 and 2028, giving it a total ofnearly 2 million by the end of 2028. Sonatel also reported strong fiber growth in Q1 2026, with fiber subscribers up 26.5% year-on-year. It offersresidential fiber tariffsranging from 30 Mbps to 1 Gbps. Other players include Yas and GVA (Group Vivendi Africa), but they have a smaller market share.
With multiple ISPs deploying fiber infrastructure, Senegal’s telecom regulator ARTP completed an infrastructure-sharing study and adopted related decisions in 2023–2024 to promote shared access and later pilot fiber unbundling, allowing customers to change ISPs without requiring a new physical connection. The goal is to reduce deployment costs, improve coordination, and avoid overlapping infrastructure.
Cote d’Ivoire established a competitive fixed broadband market with an estimated FTTP coverage of 15%. Orange, which dominates the market, reported 680,799 broadband subscribers at the end of 2025, up 39.4% year-on-year. It offers a range of residential packages ranging from 50 Mbps to 1Gbps (it is one of the few operators in the region to do so). GVA is also present with the brand Canalbox, offering a Start (50Mbps) and a Premium (200 Mbps) package.
To drive fixed broadband adoption further, the Ivorian regulatory body, ARTCI, along with the Ministry of Digital Transition, is implementing a multi-technology strategy. This strategy combines the expansion of terrestrial fiber in urban centers, the commercial deployment of 5G (started in July 2026), and the integration of licensed non-terrestrial networks (NTN) to cover rural areas where physical fiber is economically un
The fixed broadband market in Nigeria has historically been predominantly fixed wireless access (FWA), but fiber jumped to the top in recent months. According to the telecom regulator, NCC, the number of FTTP subscribers rose from 84,141 in Q4 2025 to265,000 in June 2026, more than a 3x jump in just 18 months, overtaking FWA subscribers (217,083 in Q1 2026) for the first time. To accelerate the momentum, the NCC launched a Wholesale Fixed Broadband Market Assessment study to encourage infrastructure sharing and promote the open-access model. It also encouraged the local states to reduce or eliminate right-of-way (RoW) charges to reduce the cost of deploying fiber.
Ghana’s broadband sector is highly concentrated with two main operators (MTN and Telecel) and a relatively mature mobile market in contrast with the under-penetrated fixed fiber market. According to theNational Communications Authority (NCA), there were261,938 fiber subscribers in Q4 2025, up 18.4% year-on-year from 221,153. Fiber is by far the dominant fixed broadband technology, while FWA representsless than 1,500 connections. However, fiber subscribers represent less than 0.8% of the population, which is in stark contrast to the 42.87 million mobile subscribers (127% population penetration). This growth from a small base obscures the reality that there is limited competition in the market, and fiber services are mostly available in urban and suburban areas, which significantly limits their growth.
Togo and Gabon are emerging as rapid-growth fiber markets thanks to favorable regulatory policies and operators’ investments. Omdia estimates that Togo reached 12% FTTP coverage of total premises at the end of 2024. According to the telecom regulatorARCEP, there were 145,344 FTTP subscribers in Q1 2026, up 13.8% year-on-year, representing a 7.6% household penetration. As with Ghana, the market is a duopoly: GVA (Canalbox) controls 55.8% of the market and Togocom (operating under the brand YAS) 44.2%. Canalbox offers50 Mbps and 200 Mbps packages; YAS’sresidential portfoliois similar, with the addition of 100 Mbps weekly and monthly tariffs.
A 2022 study published byARCEPfound that Togolese ISPs offered some of the cheapest sub-25 Mbps packages in West Africa while high-speed tiers (>100 Mbps) were among the most expensive. As a result, ARCEP carried out tariff revisions that lowered FTTP prices, enabling customers to move from 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps for the same price. In January 2025, it decided to reducewholesale pricing by 60%for the operators to access dark optical fiber (i.e., passive fiber infrastructure) to enable lower retail prices and more competition.
Last, Gabon’s fiber broadband network has centered on the capital, with more recent expansion to other provinces. The market is a duopoly:
- Moov Africa Gabon Telecom offers services in 19 cities, with speeds of up to 500 Mbps following a recent speed upgrade.
- GVA (with Canalbox brand) offers unlimited high-speed internet bundles with speeds of50 Mbpsand200 Mbps.
However, entry-level 50 Mbps packages tend to cost more than in other countries in West Africa: more than US$40 per month in Gabon compared to US$20-25 elsewhere. In late 2025, the government announced plans to establish a public-private joint venture dedicated to fiber development to stimulate competition and support infrastructure expansion. The joint venture aims to extend the national backbone by 1,800 kilometers and establish a transparent, open-access governance framework.
Diverse infrastructure and operational strategies drive divergent performance paths
Despite the investments in fiber infrastructure and the development of the market, Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence data for fixed broadband (excluding satellite) across Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal from 2023 through Q2 2026 shows download speed evolving in different ways. Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire extended fiber coverage to reach new households and lifted existing underserved broadband subscribers. On the other hand, Ghana and Senegal’s fiber-dominated markets saw significant improvements in 2026 across more speed segments, and for different reasons.
Nigeria posts the strongest and most consistent improvement of the four leading markets. Median download speed increased 2.55x between 2023 and H1 2026, from 13.50 Mbps to 34.47 Mbps, while P10 (10th percentile of slowest test samples) grew even faster over the same period (2.24 to 6.04 Mbps), and P90 (90th percentile of fastest test samples) rose more modestly (74.37 to 90.04 Mbps). Data from the last two years show that the median download speed consistently rose in every quarter, reflecting a progressive fiber build-out and steady adoption. Median upload speed increased nearly two-and-a-half times during that period from around 11 Mbps in 2023 to 25.17 Mbps in H1 2026, approaching similar levels to download speed as a result of fiber deployment (which unlocks symmetrical speeds in the downlink and uplink directions). Finally, Median latency also improved from 47.9 ms in 2023 to 35.8 ms in H1 2026, holding in the range 36-39 ms across full years 2024 and 2025.
Cote d’Ivoire shows a similar trend over the long term, though growth has stalled more recently. Median download speed rose 28.3% between 2023 and H1 2026 (47.52 to 60.99 Mbps), the fastest among the six countries. P10 jumped even faster from 5.83 Mbps to 11.39 Mbps (a 95.4% increase), while P90 grew more slowly at 16.9%. Median multi-server latency also improved overall (92.3 to 79.4 ms), suggesting that fiber helped to uplift the performance among underserved users, but there is room to increase capacity to better serve the higher end of the market, for example, by modernising CPE and end-user devices to unlock gains from modern Wi-Fi standards.
The impact of Ghana’s download speed growth is the broadest of the four leading markets over the long term: median download speed rose 69.3% between 2023 and H1 2026 (31.17 to 52.78 Mbps), P10 more than doubled from 3.03 to 7.13 Mbps (a 135.6% increase), and P90 also had a strong rally of more than 70%. Looking closely at the 2025-2026 transition, we note that the country saw a step change in upload speed and latency in Q3 2025: multi-server latency from 34.6 ms to 12.6 ms and median upload speed jumped from 22.60 Mbps to 49.16 Mbps in the same quarter, closing the gap with download speed, as the majority of connections are fiber offering symmetric throughput. The recent landing of Meta-backed2Africa subsea cables in the capital, Accra, should bring additional traffic capacity to the country, translating into a better experience for end users.
In Senegal, the most advanced market in fiber coverage, median download speed rose 78% between 2023 and H1 2026 (to 38.55 Mbps), but most of that growth came in the last year, more than doubling between the end of 2025 and June 2026. P90 downloads more than doubled in three and a half years, with the same 2026 breakout. The same pattern is repeated for P10. Latency fell by 16.3% to nearly 80 ms in H1 2026. This shift lines up with Sonatel’s residential fiber overhaul in February 2026 to simplify its fixed broadband catalog, reduce monthly prices on high-end fiber packages and increase internet speeds across the board.
Contrasting performance trends and challenges in Togo and Gabon
The fiber market in Gabon and Togo is at an earlier stage of development compared to the leading fiber markets in West Africa. Their performance trends diverge sharply: Togo’s performance improved through Q1 2025 and has since plateaued, while Gabon’s improvement has been slower and more gradual throughout the period.
In Togo, we identified two phases. Median download speed gained 19.8% to 34.49 Mbps in Q1 2025, before plateauing in the range 34-38 Mbps in the second phase, while latency initially held in the 97-103 ms range before dropping to 41.8 ms in Q2 2025, staying in the 39-58 ms range through Q2 2026. More interestingly, P10 download speed increased by nearly 56% to 7.61 Mbps over the full period, indicating efforts to bridge the performance gap and uplift the lowest tiers. This is likely the result of efforts from ARCEP to raise the minimum speed. On the other hand, P90 download speed only gained nearly 10% over the full period to 95.98 Mbps, reflecting the propensity of high-end customers to select the 100 Mbps package.
Gabon shows more modest performance improvements. Median download speed grew just 15.9% between 2023 and Q2 2026 to 42.25 Mbps, with P10 and P90 similarly low gains (an increase of23.5% and 20.1%, respectively), and most of the improvement occurred in 2024. Although its throughput ranked in the middle among the countries analyzed, its latency remained the poorest across these markets, despite achieving an 18.5% reduction over the period to 179.8 ms in Q2 2026. The recently announced extension to the national backbone should help to reduce latency further.
Addressing growth challenges for ISPs, including deployment costs, security risks, and satellite competition
ISPs face a number of challenges to monetize their fiber infrastructure. The rollout cost per premise passed in Africa is higher than in other developing markets. In addition, the right-of-way fees and bureaucratic hurdles can add to the cost, while the average revenue per user (ARPU)can be limited given the relatively low purchasing power. One potential way to address affordability constraints and encourage take-up is to offer prepaid packages and weekly tariffs, like YAS Togo.
Once the infrastructure is built, it could be voluntarily or involuntarily damaged. For example, in 2024, Nigeria recordedover 50,000 fiber cuts, with around 30,000attributed to road construction projects. That prompts some governments, like those in Nigeria and Gambia, to issue policies to protect fiber infrastructure. ISPs are also adjusting their practices, shifting toward aerial fiber deployments on utility poles or utilizing specialized anti-theft coatings on buried conduits.
ISPs also face disruption from satellite operators, particularly those operating Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink. The latter has rapidly expanded its presence across Africa, securing licenses in more than 28 countries, withan estimated half million subscribers; Nigeria being one of the largest markets on the continent with 66,523 subscribers in Q2 2025, according to the NCC (Nigeria). Starlink is now available in the rest of West Africa: Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, while it is set to launch inCôte d’Ivoire in July 2026.
To defend their position, ISPs and converged operators are partnering with geostationary (GEO) and medium-earth-orbit (MEO) operators to offer hybrid satellite broadband services. For example, Orange Côte d’Ivoire launched ‘Orange Sat’ which uses Eutelsat’s KONNECT satellite platform to offer a prepaid “Wi-Fi village” solution in rural areas, while Sonatel Orange (Senegal) launched a similar service targetingresidential and enterprise customerswith unlimited broadband.
The West African region reflects the continent’s broader fiber infrastructure evolution and the countries’ ambitions to turn it into a driver for socio-economic growth. As our analysis of leading markets (Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Ghana) shows, operators have successfully transitioned from initial, capital-intensive rollouts focused on one or two cities to achieving coverage at scale, a broader subscriber base, and performance improvements. Togo and Gabon are at an earlier stage where growth is driven by regulatory interventions and targeted infrastructure expansion rather than established market demand.
Long-term profitability depends on how well operators can balance high-density urban builds with innovative, lower-cost tariff models that address the affordability hurdle. For rural expansion, satellite-terrestrial partnership models offer an opportunity to cost-effectively cater to the needs of the unserved and underserved areas in order to bridge the digital divide and protect their market shares.
If you are interested in Ookla’s solutions and services for network intelligence and management,get in touch.
Ookla retains ownership of this article including all of the intellectual property rights, data, content graphs and analysis. This article may not be quoted, reproduced, distributed or published for any commercial purpose without prior consent. Members of the press and others using the findings in this article for non-commercial purposes are welcome to publicly share and link to report information with attribution to Ookla.
