NIWBQR reports poor internet offerings in Abuja

National Independent Wireless Broadband Quality Reporting (NIWBQR) service, which compares the quality of RF deployment for LTE amongst service providers in Nigeria, has reported not so pleasant internet offerings by service providers in Abuja.

NIWBQR, conducted by Enextgen Wireless provides an independent view of the quality of RF deployment of LTE networks in Nigeria and benchmarked: MTN, GLO, 9Mobile, Airtel and Smile.

The observations of the study are: “Globacom has so limited the peak downlink throughput as to make it lower than that of a normal UMTS network using the same channel bandwidth.

NIWBQR also found that “the number of RRC Connection drops in 9Mobile network is very high; Abnormally high RRC Connection Failures occur in Glo network; Smile has the worst record in connection drops and failures; and that Airtel and MTN networks appear to have been tested before being launched”

According to NIWBQR the “Verification of the quality of RF performance of an LTE network is usually a pre-requisite for commercial deployment. Global reports on LTE coverage and application layer indicators such as throughput only make sense in the context of networks that are, to a large extent, properly deployed”

Currently, NIWBQR focuses on the quality of RF deployment which has been the biggest obstacle to acceptable performance of LTE networks in Nigeria.
The report was based on consumer (paid subscriber) experience in the LTE networks in Abuja during daytime hours.

Data was collected in the same area on November 6th,7th and 9th 2017. The latest drive test was conducted on 14th ,15th and 16th of November 2018 between the hours of 9am- 8pm daily.