Internet will only get cheaper if more people use it

Professor Nii Narku Quaynor, the engineer widely credited as the pioneer of the internet in Ghana, has called for increased internet penetration as a key solution to reducing the high cost of data services in the country.

His remarks come amid growing public concern that Ghana remains one of the most expensive countries for internet access within the subregion.

Speaking on The Point of View with Bernard Avle on Channel One TV on Monday, September 22, 2025, Prof. Quaynor explained that expanding access and usage is central to achieving economies of scale in the sector.

He said as service providers “it comes with the volume of bandwidth. If the users are consuming more bandwidth from economies of scale, I can do better.”

He noted that internet service providers often cite the high costs of international connectivity as a challenge, but argued that investing in additional undersea cables could resolve this—provided there is a larger customer base to sustain such investments.

“If the bottleneck on the part of the internet providers is the connection to the outside, then they should buy more undersea cables. But they will also tell you they don’t have the money unless they have lots of users who will pay for it. That problem has always existed,” he added.

Recounting the early days of internet services in Ghana, Prof. Quaynor said providers used to charge as much as $100 a month per subscriber to cover infrastructure costs, but prices dropped steadily as more users came on board.

“When we started the internet, we used to charge $100 a month for every subscriber, and it was because I could anticipate that if I charged 200 subscribers, I could meet the $2,000 requirement and use the rest to expand. After we did that, every time we got more users, we lowered the price,” he explained.

According to him, encouraging new users is vital for driving down costs.

“The new users here are very helpful because they do not consume much and spend less time on pages. It is the experienced users who consume the bandwidth. So you want new users to cover the experienced ones. So we need to improve internet penetration for the internet to be cheaper,” he stressed.