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Nigeria ranks low in global Internet speed index

By Ibukun Igbasan
21 June 2017   |   4:00 am
Although there have been an upsurge in Internet activities in Nigeria, however, the speed is still ranked low compared to global standard.

PHOTO: Face2face Africa

Although there have been an upsurge in Internet activities in Nigeria, however, the speed is still ranked low compared to global standard.

This is confirmed in a report by Akamai, a content delivery platform, which ranked Internet speed from Kenya as the highest in Africa at 12.2Mbps while Qatar, and Israel’s Internet speed at 13.7Mbps placed them top in Middle East and Asia regions.

Akamai in its report for first quarter (Q1 2017), released in May, which surveyed countries in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) regions, Nigeria’s Internet speed ranked 114 out of 143 countries surveyed, with a speed of 3.9Mbps against a global standard of 7.2Mbps.

According to the Content Delivery Network (CDN) Service Firm, the average connection speed posted by the MEA leaders was almost 12Mbps higher than that seen in Egypt, which had 2.0Mbps, making it the MEA country with the slowest speeds, whereas the gap between the top- and bottom-ranked countries was 13 Mbps in the previous quarter.

From the report, three surveyed MEA countries had average connection speeds above 10Mbps in Q1 2017 — down from four in the Q4 2016. At the other end of the spectrum, three surveyed MEA countries saw average connection speeds below 4Mbps in Q1, up from two in the previous quarter including Nigeria at 3.9Mbps.

Quarterly changes among the MEA countries were mixed, with five countries posting gains. These ranged from 0.1 per cent in Turkey to 15 per cent in Qatar. Among the eight countries seeing quarter-over-quarter declines, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had the biggest loss at 20 per cent, while Morocco had the smallest at 0.4 per cent.

Year-over-year changes were mostly positive, with only two countries — Egypt, and the UAE seeing declines of 19 per cent and 2.2 per cent respectively. Kenya, and Qatar had the largest yearly increases, as their average connection speeds jumped 67 per cent and 64 per cent respectively, while Israel posted the smallest gain at 1.4 per cent.


On mobile connectivity, contributed by telecommunications equipment operator, Ericsson, which provided insight into mobile voice-and data-traffic trends, said Nigeria, and Qatar did not qualify as they did not meet the minimum requirement of 25,000 unique IPv4 addresses seen by Akamai and identified as coming from a mobile network during the quarter.

In Q1 2017, 62 surveyed countries/regions around the world qualified for inclusion in the mobile section, up from 61 in Q2 2016. The countries that qualified in MEA were Israel, Egypt, Iran, Kenya, Kuwait, Morocco, Namibia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, and UAE.

Among the qualifying surveyed countries/regions, 32 in total had an average mobile connection speed at or above the 10Mbps broadband threshold (up from 30 in the previous quarter), while 60 achieved average speeds at or above the 4Mbps broadband level (up from 58). Within the individual continental regions, the following qualifying surveyed countries/regions had the highest average mobile connection speeds:

Americas: United States, 10.7Mbps Asia Pacific: Australia, 15.7Mbps Europe: United Kingdom, 26.0Mbps Middle East/Africa: Kenya, 13.7Mbps.

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