Almost Everyone Now Lives Under a Mobile Signal. Two Billion Still Do Not Use It

by Arjun Mehta · August 27, 2026

Science & Technology Writer, The Globe Ledger

Every year one figure escapes the report it came from and travels the world on its own: the share of humanity that uses the internet. In the current edition it is 74 per cent. The figure is carefully produced, but it is a nowcast rather than a measurement, and on its own it explains almost nothing about who is left out or why. The document underneath it is far more interesting than the headline, because it separates two problems that are usually treated as one.

The source is Measuring digital development: Facts and Figures 2025, the annual statistical report of the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations agency for telecommunications, published in November 2025. It estimates that roughly 6 billion people used the internet during 2025, about 74 per cent of the world's population, leaving more than a quarter of humanity - on the order of 2 billion people - offline. The ITU is explicit in its methodology note that the 2025 usage figures are nowcasts produced from member state submissions that mostly run through 2024, not observations of 2025. Year-on-year growth in the number of users was 3.3 per cent, up from 2.9 per cent the previous year, when the ITU put the online population at 5.8 billion, or 71 per cent.

Two gaps that are nothing alike

Set the connection figures beside the network figures and the shape of the remaining problem changes. In the same 2025 edition, the ITU estimates that 96 per cent of the world's population lives within range of a 3G or better mobile network, 93 per cent within range of 4G, and 55 per cent within range of 5G. The number of people with no mobile broadband coverage at all is put at roughly 312 million.

That comparison is the whole argument. Around 2 billion people do not use the internet, but only a few hundred million of them live somewhere a network does not reach. The overwhelming majority of the world's offline population lives inside coverage and does not connect. Engineers describe the first as the coverage gap and the second as the usage gap, and they respond to completely different interventions: towers and spectrum close the first, while the second is a question of price, devices, electricity, language, literacy and confidence.

What the usage gap is made of

Price is the part the ITU measures most precisely. Using retail prices in force in February 2025, the report puts the global median cost of an entry-level mobile broadband basket at 1.4 per cent of gross national income per capita, against the Broadband Commission affordability target of 2 per cent. The median masks the distribution: the same basket costs 0.4 per cent of GNI per capita in high-income countries and 12.3 per cent in low-income countries. For fixed broadband the global median is 2.5 per cent, ranging from 1.0 per cent in high-income economies to 29.5 per cent in low-income ones. By the ITU's count, 130 of 205 economies meet the 2 per cent target for mobile broadband, and internet service remains unaffordable in around 60 per cent of low- and middle-income economies.

Skills are measured far less well, and the report is candid about it. The 2025 edition draws digital skills data from 48 countries, with only a handful reporting an overall skill level, and the results span an enormous range. Communication and collaboration is the strongest area: in every country reporting data on it, at least three-quarters of internet users have at least basic skills. Content creation and problem-solving are weaker, particularly in lower-income countries. With that few comparable submissions, the skills picture is an indication rather than a global estimate, and should be read as one.

Where the offline live

The regional spread in the 2025 edition is wide. Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Americas sit in a band between roughly 88 and 93 per cent of population online. Asia-Pacific is at 77 per cent and the Arab States at 70 per cent. Africa is at 36 per cent. Grouped by income, 94 per cent of people in high-income countries use the internet against 23 per cent in low-income countries. The least developed countries are at 34 per cent, growing 7.4 per cent a year, and landlocked developing countries at 38 per cent, growing 5.5 per cent.

The settlement pattern matters as much as the country. The ITU puts urban internet use at 85 per cent of population and rural use at 58 per cent, a ratio of 1.5 that has narrowed only slightly from 1.6 in 2022. Newer infrastructure is more lopsided still: 66 per cent of urban residents worldwide live within 5G coverage against 40 per cent of rural residents, and 5G reaches 84 per cent of the population in high-income countries against 4 per cent in low-income ones, 74 per cent in Europe against 12 per cent in Africa.

The gender gap that stopped closing

In the 2025 edition the ITU estimates that 77 per cent of men and 71 per cent of women use the internet, giving a gender parity score of 0.92 - and the ITU notes that this is the same score as in 2019, indicating no progress towards global parity in recent years. In absolute terms the report counts about 280 million more male than female internet users worldwide in 2025. The gap is widest in the poorest countries, and Africa, while still behind every other region, has improved: its parity score rose from 0.70 in 2019 to 0.78 in 2025. Europe, the Americas and the CIS have reached parity.

How the number is actually made

None of these figures are a census. The ITU's methodology note for the 2025 edition describes a layered construction: administrative data supplied by member states, telecommunication regulators, ministries and operators, supplemented by household surveys — the Gallup World Poll and UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys are named — and by World Bank demographic and income data. Where a country has no recent survey, the agency imputes and models, using time-series methods including ARIMA on historical series, with mobile broadband subscriptions, affordability and GNI per capita as predictors.

Three caveats in that note deserve to travel with the headline number. The 2025 usage figures are nowcasts, extrapolated from official submissions that mostly run through 2024, not observations of 2025. The mobile coverage figures are end-2024 estimates. And household surveys of internet use rarely cover children under five, so the ITU asks that the estimates be read with caution. The agency also warns that regional and global aggregates can differ from those in earlier editions as countries revise their submissions, which is why quoting a share without naming the edition is a trap.

The ITU's Global Connectivity Report 2025 frames the endpoint in a way that suits the data better than a single percentage does: universal and meaningful connectivity, assessed across availability and quality, affordability, devices, skills, and safety and security rather than as a yes-or-no question about being a user, and measured against 2030 aspirational targets. The ITU conventionally treats universality as an internet penetration rate of at least 95 per cent, and the Global Connectivity Report reports that the three most consistently cited reasons for not using the internet are lack of need, lack of skills and the cost of service. Getting from 74 to 95 will not look like the past decade. The towers are largely built. What remains is the part that infrastructure spending cannot buy.