Professor Nii Narku Quaynor, the engineer credited with pioneering the internet in Ghana, has urged policymakers and service providers to prioritise internet penetration as the most effective way to drive down the high cost of data in the country.
His comments come at a time when Ghana continues to rank among the most expensive destinations for internet access in 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 would enable economies of scale in the sector, ultimately reducing prices for consumers.
“It comes with the volume of bandwidth. If the users are consuming more bandwidth from economies of scale, I can do better,” he noted.
He acknowledged that internet service providers often cite the high costs of international connectivity as a major challenge. However, he argued that investments in additional undersea cables could ease the burden—provided there is a larger customer base to sustain such infrastructure.
“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 explained.
Reflecting on Ghana’s early internet journey, Prof. Quaynor recalled that providers once charged as much as $100 per subscriber monthly, mainly to recover infrastructure costs. As subscriber numbers grew, however, prices steadily dropped.
“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 recounted.
He stressed that attracting new users is crucial to sustaining growth and lowering 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 added.
Prof. Quaynor’s intervention reinforces ongoing calls for affordable data as internet access becomes increasingly central to Ghana’s economic growth, innovation, and digital inclusion.
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