Internet Speed: See Where Nigeria Ranks

Where does our beloved Nigeria rank? With an Internet speed put at 4.13Mbps, Nigeria is ranked 82nd out of the 87th leading telecoms country surveyed by Open Signal, a platform, which beams search light into the coverage and performance of mobile operators worldwide.


Open Signal in its Global State of Mobile Networks report, noted that operators in South Africa offers the fastest Internet speed across Africa at 9.93Mbps, while
South Korea’s speed is the fastest globally at 37.54Mbps.

Open Signal explained that overall speed measurements vary considerably from country to country depending on their particular stage of generation – 3G and 4G development. For instance, a country with fast Long Term Evolution (LTE) speed but low 4G availability might have a much lower overall speed than a country with moderate LTE speed but a very high level of 4G availability.

For clarity, the report defines overall speed “as the average mobile data connection a user experiences based on both the speeds and availability of a country’s 3G and 4G networks”.

For Nigeria, the implication is that the Internet speed is still very low despite the availability of various submarine cable systems with about 10 Terabytes capacity of bandwidth still lying fallow at the various landing points in the country. It has been an uphill task to move this capacity from the shores to the hinterlands and other cities because of lack last mile infrastructure. This has resulted in Internet users spending several minutes to either upload or download a video successfully.