Nearly half of Africa’s Wi-Fi users are still connecting over Wi-Fi 4, a standard first ratified in 2009, according to new data from Ookla.
Ookla, the network analytics company behind the Speedtest service, said in its Global State of Wi-Fi 2026 analysis that Wi-Fi 4 accounted for 48.8% of users across the continent in Q1 2026. The report draws on Speedtest measurements collected between Q1 2022 and Q1 2026.
Still anchored to 2.4 GHz
The congested 2.4 GHz band, the oldest and most crowded slice of Wi-Fi spectrum, still carried 52.4% of all African samples in the first quarter. That is a marked shift from Q1 2022, when it held a commanding 76.4% share.
Over the same period, the 5 GHz band, which offers faster, less congested connections, nearly doubled its share from 23.6% to 47.6%. The newer 6 GHz band, used by Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 devices, registered a flat 0.0% across Africa as a whole. Even in South Africa, the continent’s most advanced market, 6 GHz traffic reached just 0.2%.
Newer standards are gaining, slowly
Adoption of more recent Wi-Fi generations is rising. Wi-Fi 5 grew from a 19.9% share in Q1 2022 to 34.4% in Q1 2026, while Wi-Fi 6 climbed more than tenfold, from 1.6% to 16.8%, Ookla said. Wi-Fi 7, the latest standard, made up just 0.1% of samples in the region.
A wide gap to the global frontier
The continent trails the global picture. Worldwide, Wi-Fi 6 market share rose from 6% in Q1 2022 to 27% in Q1 2026, and nearly 60% of Wi-Fi users now connect to the 5 GHz band, according to the analysis.
Ookla noted that the device cycle is not the main constraint: 61.4% of global Speedtest samples from Android phones already support Wi-Fi 6 or newer. The bottleneck lies more in the routers and access points that homes and offices run, and in how much 6 GHz spectrum regulators have opened for unlicensed use.
For African networks, that points to a long runway. Hardware makers are already moving on, with MikroTik touting a Wi-Fi 8 router, but the continent’s indoor connectivity has room to improve well before it reaches the standards now common elsewhere.
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