Hiroshi Nomura is 76, and he’s teaching a room of pensioners in Tokyo’s Suginami ward how to switch on a smartphone. “Unlike televisions, smartphones take time to get up and running because they are driven by programs, just like PCs,” he explains.
Japan is one of the most connected societies on Earth, but it is also one of the oldest, and in the past few years its government has quietly withdrawn the analogue services: paper health insurance cards were abolished in December 2024, and the last 3G network closed this April. If you can’t use a smartphone in Japan, you are increasingly going to struggle with the state.
TelcoForge recently looked at the impact of memory prices on handset affordability in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the binding constraint is the price of the device. In more well-off markets the digital divide doesn’t disappear, but it changes how it looks from country to country.
There is no one reason for people not to use that broadband, and the principal reasons vary from country to country. Unlike a decade ago, coverage is the least of the problems. The GSMA counts 3.1 billion people worldwide who live within mobile broadband coverage but don’t use it.
| Market | The problem | Flagship response | Route to people |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | The device costs too much | Tax cuts; locked-phone financing | Shop till; mobile money |
| United States | The monthly bill costs too much | $30/month broadband subsidy | Provider billing |
| Japan | Excluded people lack skills | Free smartphone classes | Phone shops |
| UK | Awareness of support | Social tariffs | User search |
Every market has all these problems in different proportions. In the UK only 5% of mobile users say they struggle to afford their service, but 15% of adults lack foundation digital skills. In the US, 4% of adults are offline, but only 54% of households earning under $30,000 have home broadband, and 34% of that group rely on a smartphone alone. For poor Americans, as for most Africans, the phone is the internet.
Old Bill
The US Affordable Connectivity Program paid $30 a month towards broadband for low-income households, plus a one-off $100 towards a laptop or tablet. By early 2024, 23 million households had signed up.
Congress didn’t renew the $14.2 billion programme, and it closed in June 2024. A Brattle Group report estimates 5 million households dropped broadband entirely afterwards, and another 8.3 million moved to slower, cheaper plans. A survey by the National Lifeline Association found around 40% of former recipients had cut spending on food to stay online. Both come from organisations that wanted the programme renewed, but the direction is not seriously disputed.
“I’ve had to go to cheaper household items, cheaper detergents,” Serena Salisbury, a caregiver in Wisconsin, told the nonprofit Human-I-T. “And my electric bill – I had to find a different way of paying just to keep my internet.”
The Digital Equity Act set aside $2.75 billion for another aspect of the problem: skills training, devices and “digital navigators” who help people through online forms, prescriptions and job applications. In May 2025, President Trump declared it “unconstitutional” and promised “no more woke handouts based on race!” The grants were cancelled.
“They have health care needs, but they don’t have the digital skills. It’s like a foreign space,” said Megan Waiters, a digital navigator in Alabama, of the people she had been helping.
In July this year a federal judge ruled that the Act’s racial criteria were unconstitutional but the rest of it could stand. “Common sense dictates that Congress would prefer to have a version of the Digital Equity Act without the racial criterion than to have no law at all,” Judge John Bates wrote.
It’s not that there’s something wrong with American politics in particular. A discretionary programme lasts only as long as the political will to fund it. India’s state-level smartphone handouts, covered in our previous piece, died the same way when governments changed.
Shop Talk
Japan took a very different route to solving the access problem, built on their need to empower users who may not be comfortable with digital services.
Since 2021, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has funded free smartphone classes for older people. They cover the basics of switching on and using a device and then practical tasks: using the My Number card, booking medical appointments, finding disaster information and so on. Classes are free, people can repeat them as often as they like, and many are held in mobile phone shops. Local governments fill the gaps where there’s no shop nearby. More than two million people have taken part. The Digital Agency adds a network of volunteer “digital supporters” to help in communities.
Using phone shops is a sensible choice. Older people already go to places like this – if nothing else, to benefit from air conditioning – and they are staffed by people whose job is explaining phones, owned by companies with an interest in more customers using more services. The state pays for the teaching; the operators provide the room, the expertise and benefit from the footfall.
There has been a useful outcome. A January 2026 survey by Docomo’s Mobile Society Research Institute found smartphone ownership at 95% among people in their 60s, 86% in their 70s and 69% in their early 80s. Ownership among people in their early 70s rose 40 points in just three years, between 2018 and 2021.
However, the programme’s two million people trained is well short of early ambitions reported at ten million over five years. And withdrawing analogue services adds to exclusion for those who still can’t make the switch. But as a model of getting help to people where they already are, it’s still been a positive.
Nobody Knows
On paper, the UK has a good set of social tools to get people online. Most major broadband and mobile providers offer social tariffs for people on benefits, at £12–£24 a month for broadband and £10–£12 for mobile.
Uptake has not been impressive. Ofcom’s latest figures show 532,000 households on social tariffs, 8.6% of those eligible. Only 30% of eligible households even know the tariffs exist. Meanwhile, 13% of broadband bill payers, about 3.9 million people, say they are struggling with the cost.
“With awareness and uptake still stubbornly low, social tariffs simply aren’t working,” says Anne Pardoe, Head of Policy at Citizens Advice.
The problem is that the social tariffs depend upon the customer to find it, prove eligibility and ask for it. The people who most need it are often the least likely to be able to jump through these hurdles. Compare South Africa’s device tax cut, which applies automatically at the till, or Japan’s classes, which sit in a shop people already visit.
The government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan, published in February 2025, was the first strategy of its kind in a decade. Good Things Foundation, the UK’s largest digital inclusion charity, gave it “6 out of 10” after a year. Natasha Bright-Wray, its associate director of communications, said there was “so much more intervention needed, particularly on affordability.”
The wider EU picture is similar. The Commission’s 2026 State of the Digital Decade report finds 60% of Europeans have at least basic digital skills, against a target of 80% by 2030. On current trends the EU will reach about 68% by then, and won’t hit 80% until 2037. The report singles out older people, disabled people and the unemployed, and notes that “the acceleration of AI uptake is changing the skills required”.
Devices and Desires
The most effective route to market is of course the handset itself, and here the markets have gone in three different directions.
In Europe, spreading the cost of a phone over a contract is routine. In the UK it’s regulated as a form of credit. It needs a credit check, a bank account and a steady income, so it works well for the included and filters out exactly the people inclusion policy is trying to reach. Those who fail the check fall back on charity. The government’s IT Reuse for Good Charter collected 22,200 donated devices, mostly phones, in its first six months. The same government estimates that 200 million unused devices are sitting in British drawers.
Sub-Saharan Africa has not had a chance to copy that model. In Kenya, 98% of mobile subscriptions are prepaid, and most customers have no credit file. Instead lenders secure the loan against the phone itself, which can be locked remotely if payments stop, and customers repay small daily or weekly amounts through mobile money. Safaricom, M-KOPA and PayJoy now count their customers in the millions and tens of millions. It reaches people European credit checks would turn away, at the cost of higher effective prices and a lender who can switch off an essential device.
In Japan operators used to give phones away with long contracts, and the government decided that was hiding the real price of both. Since a 2019 revision of the Telecommunications Business Act, handset discounts have been capped to separate the cost of the device from the cost of the service, alongside a 90% cut in early termination fees. Japan’s view is that bundled subsidies distort competition. Europe’s is that they’re a normal part of selling phones. Africa’s is that, done right, they’re a route to inclusion.
Would a locked-phone financing model, with strong consumer protections, serve the people UK credit checks exclude? And would regulators accept it for a device people now need to reach their bank, their benefits and the NHS? It’s an unstraightforward question – not least because those consumer protections might undermine the model – but perhaps better than relying on contracts to cover people who, by definition, are excluded.
Pattern Recognition
Across these four markets there is a consistent pattern. The interventions that worked went through a channel people already used: the shop till in South Africa, the phone shop in Japan, mobile money in Kenya. The ones that struggled either depend upon inbound traffic, like UK social tariffs, or depended on politicians’ continuing will, like the ACP and the Digital Equity Act in the US and India’s smartphone handouts.
In every success, the operator already owns the channel. It holds the billing relationship, usually runs shops, knows which customers are struggling to pay, and often sells the device. That makes operators the obvious delivery partner for digital inclusion, whether or not they want the job.
Good Things Foundation’s Helen Milner has argued for “an in-person, informal hub in every community to help people get online.” Japan has found its hubs on the high street, in the shops operators already run.
While each country has different circumstances, it’s worth exploring what elements could be transferred from one country to another. For example, would UK and European operators run state-funded skills classes in their shops, as Japan’s do, and what would they need in return? Could social tariffs be applied automatically, using data the state and operators already hold, rather than waiting for customers to ask – and, again, how does that affect the bottom line? What might a regulated, consumer-safe version of locked-phone financing look like and how would the financial mechanisms work? And who pays when the government money tap turns off?
TelcoForge’s next piece will look at the forces reshaping the low end of the device market. If you work on inclusion at an operator, a regulator or a charity, we’d like to hear what’s working for you.
