Telecommunication in Namibia

Compared to the European Union, Namibia is massively lagging behind in the development of telecommunications. Under the country code +264, there were a total of 3.04 million connections in 2020. Among them were 2.90 million mobile phones, which corresponds to an average of 1.1 per person. In the EU, this figure is 1.2 mobile phones per person.

With about 78,280 webhosts, Namibia is below the world's average by population. At the end of 2020, 544 million of these, or about 1 percent, were secured with SSL or comparable encryption.

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Development of telephone and internet connections

With an average download speed of 8.9 Mbit/second for fixed-network broadband internet, Namibia ranked 152nd in an international comparison. The upload rate was only 6.2 Mbit/second (132nd place). The quality of the Internet, consisting of signal fluctuations (jitter) and latency, is very far ahead at 44th place.
In mobile internet, i.e. on tablets and smartphones, Namibia comes 84th with a download speed of 20.67 Mbit/second. The upload speed of around 9 Mbit was only enough for 90th place.

The Speedtest Global Index published regularly by Ookla is based on several million individual measurements in February 2022 from 180 countries.

The following diagrams show the development of the various telephone and Internet connections as a percentage of the country's population. Values above 100% mean that, on average, every inhabitant has more than one connection.

Access to the Internet in Namibia from 1990 - 2020

Broadband internet in Namibia 2005 - 2020

Namibia is lagging behind in the expansion of broadband Internet connections. Around 41% of all residents have access to the Internet. Around 3% have their own fast Internet connection, which is at least faster than the former ISDN (more than 256 kbit/s). All fixed connections via DSL, cable or satellite were counted here, but not those connected to the Internet via mobile communications.

Landlines 1990 - 2020

Mobile phones 1990 - 2020

Distribution in 2020	Namibia Total	Namibia percent	EU Total	EU percent
Internet users	1.04 m	41.00 %	379.48 m	84.74 %
Broadband users	71,063.00	2.80 %	163.72 m	36.56 %
Landlines	140,370.00	5.52 %	160.15 m	35.76 %
Mobile cellulars	2.90 m	114.06 %	540.56 m	120.71 %

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