Nigeria Drops 24 Places to Become the 31st Nation With the Worst Internet Speed in the World

A recent report by Cable, one of the world’s leading broadband magazines, has ranked Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria, 176th out of 207 countries on the worldwide broadband speed league 2019.

This puts Nigeria amongst the nations with the worst internet speeds in Africa.

At 176th, Nigeria drops a significant figure of 24 places from its previous position of 152nd position in 2018 and 81 places from 95th in the 2017 report.

According to the report, Nigeria has an average download speed of 1.56Mbps(a drop from 1.86Mbps recorded in 2018), which means it takes an average of over seven hours to download a five-gigabyte file in HD.

This is several hours behind the fastest broadband speed, 85.2Mbps of Taiwan where it takes just eight minutes to download the same file.

At such speed, Nigeria also lags behind 22 other African countries
out of the 40 countries listed -Madagascar, South Africa, Kenya, Namibia, Rwanda, Cabo Verde, Uganda, Ghana, Zambia, Burundi, Seychelles, Zimbabwe, Comoros, Tanzania, Senegal, Mozambique, Liberia, Togo, Botswana, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Mali.

Madagascar retains its place as the African nation with the fastest internet speed. Clocking in at an average speed of 22.57Mbps. It was ranked 33rd globally. This is so because of the nation’s underwater cables capacity

Interestingly, Europe and parts of Asia dominated the leaderboard once again. This may owing largely to their strong focus on pure fibre (FTTP) networks, which is not the same in the case of many African countries, including Nigeria.

With about 120m GSM internet subscribers, and the presence of third generation of wireless technology, 3G and fourth generation of wireless technology, 4G, internet speed is still low in Nigeria.

This speed, attributable to the poor fibre infrastructure in the country, leads to slow or unreliable connectivity and importantly, expensive data. This will, in turn, hamper economic growth and job creation as well as restricts Nigeria’s aspiration to keep up with global trends on innovations and creativity.

High-speed internet remains a necessity as the nation’s internet population increases alongside the rollout and uptake of the latest technology. It is time to do more regarding infrastructure to bolster broadband speed.

The summary of it all? Nigerians deserve internet service that is reliable, fast, and cheap.