South Africa is the only country on the African continent registering any meaningful use of the latest 6GHz Wi-Fi spectrum – and even its leading position barely shows up on the global scoreboard.

That is the headline takeaway for the region from Ookla’s Global State of Wi-Fi 2026 report, which draws on Speedtest data from Android smartphones to track how quickly the world is migrating to newer Wi-Fi generations and the 6GHz band that underpins them.

Just 0.2% of Wi-Fi connections in South Africa ran over the 6GHz band in the first quarter of 2026, according to Ookla. Across Africa as a whole the figure rounded to 0.0%, the lowest of any region measured. North America, by contrast, put 13.8% of its Wi-Fi traffic on 6GHz – a sixfold increase in two years.

In South Africa’s case, it is not a problem of regulation. Icasa opened the lower 6GHz band (5.925-6.425GHz) for licence-exempt use in 2023, clearing the way for Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 equipment to tap the spectrum.

Last month the regulator went further, gazetting its final “innovation spectrum” regulations, which confirmed that the lower 6GHz band will remain licence-exempt and shared among wireless internet service providers, Wi-Fi deployments, private networks and community operators rather than being auctioned to mobile operators.

Bottleneck

The bottleneck, the data suggests, sits not in spectrum policy but in the equipment inside people’s homes. The 6GHz band is of no use without both a router and a device that can reach it: Wi-Fi 6 hardware cannot see the band at all, and only Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 kit can. In a market where households keep routers and handsets for years, and where service providers have been slow to bundle 6GHz-capable customer premises equipment, an allocation on paper turns into real-world use only gradually.

That lag shows up in the generational mix. Wi-Fi 4 – a standard finalised back in 2009 – still accounted for 48.8% of Africa’s Wi-Fi samples in the first quarter, with Wi-Fi 5 a fast riser at 34.4%, up from 19.9% four years earlier. Wi-Fi 6 climbed from 1.6% to 16.8% over the same period, while Wi-Fi 7 barely registered at 0.1%. The congested 2.4GHz band remained the continent’s majority carrier at 52.4%, down from 76.4% in 2022, with the 5GHz band the chief beneficiary, rising from 23.6% to 47.6%.

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Ookla cautioned that the economics could get harder before they get easier. Surging demand for AI data centre infrastructure has driven up the price of high-performance memory and processors, inflating component costs across the semiconductor supply chain and raising the bill of materials for both smartphones and routers. That will probably result in a longer adoption timeline, the company said.

Globally, Wi-Fi 7 remains nascent at 1.8% of samples, while Wi-Fi 6 has reached 26.7% and the 5GHz band still carries close to 60% of all Wi-Fi traffic.

Where adoption has taken off, policy and commercial muscle have gone hand in hand:

Singapore has the world’s highest share of Wi-Fi 7 users at 25.1%, which Ookla attributed to a government drive to lift home broadband to 10Gbit/s and to telecommunications operators bundling Wi-Fi 7 routers into those packages.
North America’s lead owes much to early deployment of 6GHz equipment by ISPs such as Charter Communications and Frontier.

Research firm Omdia, cited in the report, expects consumer Wi-Fi 7 equipment to grow from 3.6% of the global installed base in 2025 to 13.8% by 2030, with Wi-Fi 6 remaining dominant at 62%. The next standard, Wi-Fi 8, is expected to reach the market from 2028, with a focus less on headline speed than on reliability – steadier performance in congested homes, lower latency and fewer dropped connections. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media