Africa’s Non-inclusion in Defining Fifth Generation Mobile Networks

Abstract

This paper identifies and unpacks a troubling phenomenon whereby Africans have historically been and currently are de-facto excluded from processes that set mobile network standards such as 3G, 4G, and (now) 5G. It combines technical and procedural observations and colonial discourses of computing, concluding that enshrined systems and processes that steer the changes in mobile technology disempower African inputs and represent a continuation of the single use of situated techniques, skills, methods and processes in the production of core mobile technologies, all conceptualised outside Africa.