Airtel has the fastest broadband in Nigeria as Kano beats Lagos for internet speed

The telecom broadband, Airtel, had the fastest network speed for the third quarter in a row, according to Ookla’s in its latest Q3 Market report on the state of Nigeria’s mobile and fixed networks.

According to this report, Airtel in the just-concluded third quarter of 2021 had a speed of 33.43. This makes it the fastest of the broadband networks available in the country. This is a 17% growth rate from the numbers it recorded in the first half of 2021.

These figures show steady, significant growth from the 27.18 it recorded in the first quarter of 2021 and the 28.82 speed score recorded in the second quarter of the same year.

MTN, which was its closest rival in the first three quarters of the year, recorded a speed score rating of 18.70, 25.87 and 26.15 for the first, second and third quarters, respectively. Rival telcos, Glo and  9mobile were also on the list, recording speed score ratings that are as low as 11.72 and 10.21 respectively. 

Data has continued to drive Airtel’s revenue in Nigeria despite a consistent drop in subscribers. In Q1 2021, its data revenue soared by 26% to hit $152M, up from $120M. This data revenue accounted for about 35.4% of total revenue in the year. Average data consumption per user also rose from 1.9 GB per month to 3.2 GB per month.

Similarly, in Q2, data revenue rose by 48.8% to hit $171M, up from $152M. This represented the highest growth percentage witnessed by any segment of the telco. The growth was driven by a 41.5% growth in ARPU for data and supported by a 42.2% increase in data consumption per customer as average data consumption rose to 3.8 GB per month.

Considering that data revenue continues to record impressive growths despite a drop in subscriber numbers shows a lot of Nigerians are trusting the network for their internet access.

Airtel leads on consistency score

According to the report, Airtel overtook MTN to become the broadband with the highest consistency score on mobile. The broadband recorded 89.4% consistency score compared to its closest competitor MTN that had 82.7%.

This is a 7% increase from the previous quarter when Airtel had a consistency score of 82.5%, which was 0.9% lower than MTN’s.

Recall that in its Q2 2020 report, the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, said that major telcos in the country recorded 9,077 cases of service outages on their networks. These outages resulted in unexpected disruptions to operators’ quality of service (QoS) delivery and intermittent quality of experience (QoE) by the consumers.

Of the 9,077 service outages, 4,972 were as a result of incidences of fibre cuts from construction activities and vandalism. 3,585 were as a result of access denial to telecoms sites for maintenance. While the remaining 520 cases were as a result of incidences of generator and battery theft at sites.

iPhones are the fastest devices in Nigeria

Similarly, the reports placed the iPhone 12 Pro Max 5G as the fastest of the popular devices available in the country.

These devices in the Q3 report recorded a mean download rate of 41.94 Mbps, making them faster than the iPhone 12 Pro Max, which achieved a mean download speed of 41.34 Mbps. 

The top 5 fastest devices in the country are Apple’s manufactured smartphones, from the iPhone 12 Pro Max 5G to the 2016 iPhone Xs Max. 

When it comes to cities in Nigeria with the fastest connectivity speed, details from the reports point to Kano as the city that enjoys the fastest network connections. Kano, with a mean download speed of 24.76 and an upload speed of 9.65, also had a mean latency score of 64ms. 

Lagos, with a mean download rate of 24.13 mbps, follows behind Kano as the second most populous city with the fastest internet speed.

Port Harcourt, Ibadan and Benin also made the list and had internet speeds of up to 23.95 mbps, 23.27 mbps and 21.01Mbps respectively.