ITU: Africa puts USSD payments in mobile-network exit plan

Africa’s old mobile networks can retire. The payment menu wants a plan.

Why it matters

An ITU proposal turns the unglamorous survivors of a network sunset—emergency calls, USSD payments and machine links—into the first items on the migration checklist.

Daniel Kade25 October 2026 at 19:55 UTCReading Time 2 minLast update: 25 October 2026

African administrations propose checking dependent services before older mobile networks are retired.

Summary

African administrations propose rewriting ITU Resolution 137 so retiring older mobile networks comes with a plan for emergency communications, USSD-based financial services and connected machines.
The draft asks ITU’s three Bureaux for migration guidance, readiness tools and help keeping essential services alive during the changeover.

A network retirement looks splendid on a spectrum chart. The old radio layer disappears; capacity and operating costs improve. Then somebody asks what happens to the payment menu on a basic phone. In Addendum 19 to their PP-26 contribution, African Telecommunication Union administrations make that question part of the ITU’s proposed future-network mandate.

The draft revises Resolution 137, the Union’s text on deploying future networks in developing countries. Its inventory of legacy dependencies is unusually concrete: emergency communications, public-safety systems, USSD-based mobile financial services, machine-to-machine links and Internet of Things devices. Those are different migration jobs. A replacement handset does little for an unattended meter, and a shiny new radio licence cannot move a payment service on its own.

The proposal would instruct the directors of ITU’s three Bureaux to assist with legacy-network sunset plans, spectrum refarming and migration of USSD, M2M and IoT services. It asks for practical guidance, toolkits and readiness assessments for national transition roadmaps. It also singles out continuity of essential services, consumer protection, device affordability and rural coverage. The 2022 Resolution 137 already spoke about smooth migration to future networks. This draft gives the phrase a list of things that could break.

ITU’s contribution register shows the addendum posted on 23 October. It is a proposal for the November Plenipotentiary Conference, with no timetable for retiring any particular network. The interesting fight is over the readiness test: who counts the services still riding the old layer, who funds the move, and who gets to say the transition is safe to finish.