is south africa The only country on the African continent that has recorded any meaningful use of the latest 6GHz Wi-Fi spectrum – and even its leading position barely shows up on the global scoreboard.
This is the key message for this sector Ookla's Global State of Wi-Fi 2026 reportWhich takes Speedtest data from Android smartphones to track how fast the world is shifting to new Wi-Fi generations and the 6GHz bands that power them.
According to Ookla, only 0.2% of Wi-Fi connections in South Africa ran on the 6GHz band in the first quarter of 2026. Across Africa the figure reached 0.0%, the lowest of any region. In contrast, North America put 13.8% of its Wi-Fi traffic on 6GHz – a sixfold increase in two years.
In the case of South Africa, it is not a problem of regulation. Icasa opened the lower 6GHz band (5.925-6.425GHz) for license-free use in 2023, clearing the way for Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 devices to tap the spectrum.
Last month the regulator went further, gazetting out its final “Innovation Spectrum” rules, which confirmed that the lower 6GHz band will remain license-free and be shared among wireless internet service providers, Wi-Fi deployments, private networks and community operators, rather than being auctioned to mobile operators.
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The data shows that the bottleneck lies not in spectrum policy but in the devices inside people's homes. The 6GHz band is of no use without both a router and devices that can access it: Wi-Fi 6 hardware can't see the band at all, and only Wi-Fi 6e and Wi-Fi 7 kits can. In a market where households have owned routers and handsets for years, and where service providers have been slow to bundle 6GHz-capable customer premises devices, the allocation on paper only slowly comes into use in the real world.
That gap is reflected in the generational mix. Wi-Fi 4 – a standard finalized in 2009 – still accounted for 48.8% of Africa's Wi-Fi samples in the first quarter, with Wi-Fi 5 rapidly gaining on 34.4%, up from 19.9% four years ago. Wi-Fi 6 grew from 1.6% to 16.8% over the same period, while Wi-Fi 7 barely registered at 0.1%. The congested 2.4GHz band remains the continent's majority carrier at 52.4%, down from 76.4% in 2022, with the 5GHz band the main beneficiary, rising from 23.6% to 47.6%.
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Ookla cautioned that the economics may get harder before they get easier. The growing demand for AI data center infrastructure has driven up the price of high-performance memory and processors, driven up component costs in the semiconductor supply chain and pushed up bills of materials for both smartphones and routers. The company said this will likely result in longer adoption timelines.
Globally, Wi-Fi 7 is nascent at 1.8% of samples, while Wi-Fi 6 has reached 26.7% and the 5 GHz band still carries about 60% of all Wi-Fi traffic.
Where adoption has taken off, policy and business forces have gone hand in hand:
- Singapore has the highest share of Wi-Fi 7 users in the world at 25.1%, which Ookla attributes to the government's drive to expand home broadband to 10Gbit/s and telecom operators bundling Wi-Fi 7 routers into those packages.
- North America's lead is due to the early deployment of 6GHz equipment by ISPs like Charter Communications and Frontier.
Research firm Omdia cited in the report expects consumer Wi-Fi 7 devices to grow from 3.6% of the global installed base in 2025 to 13.8% by 2030, while Wi-Fi 6 will dominate at 62%. The next standard, Wi-Fi 8, is expected to hit the market by 2028, with a focus less on headline speeds than on reliability – stable performance, low latency and fewer broken connections in crowded homes. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media