Nigeria Lags in 4G availability report of Africa

Nigeria seats at eighth position out of 10 top African countries with 4G availability according to mobile analytics company Opensignal in its State of Mobile Network Experience report which was published last month.

Opensignal’s 4G availability analysis shows Kenya, Morocco and South Africa featured in the top four – but the winner was something of a revelation, the firm says.

Senegal topped the Africa table with a score of 77.2% – beating some much more advanced markets in the global rankings.
According to Opensignal, Senegal can be proud of a relatively advanced 4G mobile network experience, as Orange has already launched LTE-A in the country, while Tigo’s 4G network rollout is well under way.

“Much like in our download speed analysis, only one African country saw its 4G availability fall over the past year, as Ghana saw its score drop nearly five percentage points to 61.2%,” Boyland notes.

“Our users in Senegal saw a big improvement in their chart-topping 4G availability score, which increased over 15 points to reach 77.2%, but Egypt saw the greatest improvement of over 17 points in the past year to top 65%, while Algeria and Nigeria also saw their scores grow by over 10 points.”

However, when measuring how the mobile-first markets in Africa stack up against each other, Opensignal compared 10 countries from the continent: SA, Tunisia, Morocco, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Algeria, Ghana, Senegal and Nigeria.

“South Africa topped our Africa Download Speed Experience chart with a fairly impressive score of 15Mbps, while Tunisia, Morocco and Kenya managed average speeds of over 10Mbps,” said Peter Boyland, senior analyst at Opensignal.

Earlier this year, the mobile analytics company noted SA is one of the world’s most consistent countries when comparing the difference between the slowest and fastest 4G download speeds that mobile users experience throughout the day.

In the latest study, the firm, nonetheless, says SA’s score was quite a way behind the leading global scores, but the country still just managed to sneak into the top half of the global rankings.

The firm explains that almost all the African countries it analysed saw their download speed experience scores increase over the past year, with only Algeria (3.1Mbps) seeing its average speed dip slightly.

It adds that between the first three months of 2018 and the same period of 2019, Tunisia saw the biggest increase in terms of Mbps, as its score grew 3.6Mbps to reach an average of 13.4Mbps.

“But our users in Senegal experienced the greatest download speed experience boost by percentage, as the average speed in the country jumped close to 50%,” Boyland said.