A new study by Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) and Web Foundation indicate that billions of people around the world are offline because smart mobile devices, which can give them access, are too expensive for them to afford. The researchers noted that mobile devices, which were once seen as luxuries items, are now the essential first step to getting online, but for billions of people in developing country, those devices are still not affordable. The study focused on the affordability of mobile devices in 70 low and middle-income countries, including Ghana, where mobile data penetration is about 89%, largely due to multi-simming, as a greater majority of smart mobile devices and SIM cards are in the hands of the middle to upper class urban and peri-urban dwellers. As part of the study, research collected the cheapest phones in the 70 countries and weighed their prices against the incomes of citizens, and it showed that out of the about five billion combined population of the 70 c...