The Mobile telecom market in Lagos is no walk in the park for any one network operator as this survey suggests.
The past decade has seen dramatic changes in mobile performance across Nigeria with Lagos understandably leading this trend. It would come as no surprise to anyone that Lagos was one of our chosen test areas as the mobile race for dominance within this ever-growing mega city is heating up. This of course has tremendous advantages to the mobile subscribers and I believe that’s how it should be in a service dominated environment.
On a positive note, it is was interesting to observe that all four major GSM operators (Glo, MTN, Etisalat and Airtel in no significant order) have similar technology roll-out (which is not obsolete) however it was slightly disappointing that Africa’s largest economy does not offer its mobile customers 4G LTE, a technology that has been around the block for the best part of the last five (5) years.
I am hoping a mobile operator would take the plunge to lunch mobile 4G LTE in an economy that boast of 149,787,120 active GSM mobile subscribers (according to NCC’s Monthly Subscriber Data for November 2015) with enormous return on investment.
This means that the majority of mobile Nigerians connect to the internet using 2G/3G technologies (1992 and 2001 technologies respectively). This is disappointing from a technological standpoint considering a front runner like Nigeria. It is important to note that the last major census of 2006 placed the nation’s population at 140 million meaning Nigeria has more active mobile GSM connections than its population, ‘interesting’!
This is definitely a market with high return on investment for network operators. We will delve into that in another series, for now, network performance is the subject. It is certainly not good enough to have a few home broadband companies with advertised ‘4G ‘ alone as Nigeria prides itself on its mobile and resilient population. It is yet to be determined however, the actual technology these companies preach as 4G due to slow speeds. One begins to wonder if truly this is 4G or clearly marketing strategy? (analysis for another day).
The test
Coverage
Normalized Coverage
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3G Coverage
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2G Coverage
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Call Setup Time
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Award
Based on this survey, Airtel customers would experience the best call setup/connection time as the result shows they have the least call connection delay
Mobile Data Performance
Download Speed
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Award
MTN emerged as the best operator for download speed
Upload Speed
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Award
MTN emerged as the best operator for upload speed
Web browsing
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Award
Etisalat users would enjoy the best web browsing experience of all operators
Ping latency
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Award
Glo Mobile users would experience the least lag in data network performance as the operator topped this category
Test performed and article written by Osa Ihianle