Tizeti targets 39m internet users in Nigeria, Ghana

Tizeti, a leading West African solar-based internet provider is targeting 39 million new internet users in Nigeria and Ghana, with its new products in its quest to bridge Africa’s digital gap.

This was disclosed at the second edition of Tizeti’s annual conference tagged ‘NeXTGEN 2.0: The Next Frontier’, which took place on August 5, 2022.

The conference provides a platform for stakeholders in African telecommunications, technology, and business communities to strategize for Africa’s next frontier, while networking, discovering new opportunities, and discussing breakthrough trends in the global and African telecoms and technology ecosystem.

This year’s edition had over 700 technology enthusiasts, IT innovators, startup executives, corporate business leaders, and digital thought leaders.

Kendall Ananyi, the founder and chief executive officer at Tizeti speaking at the conference stressed that the broadband gap in Africa is still very high and operators like Tizeti must expand to ensure that more Africans have access to reliable, affordable, and unlimited internet from Tizeti.

According to him, Tizeti has been providing affordable unlimited internet service in Nigeria and Ghana using solar towers which have brought about 30-50 percent cost savings on data cap plans and made it the preferred option to its competitors.

“This expansion is very strategic for us and for the continent. We have grown significantly within the last few years, being profitable in three out of the last four years, and paid our first dividend this year. We currently have over 3,884 hotspot locations and built one tower every month since we started, with 2.8 million users in Nigeria,” Ananyi said.

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He also added Tizeti delivers over 190TBPS of data a day, which is about 20 percent of what Airtel delivers.

“Using publicly available data on the website of the Nigerian Communications Commission and our internal data, we are the number one fixed Internet Service Provider by users and active users in Nigeria today and the ISP of the year 2022.”

But Ananyi believes that there is still so much room for growth as internet users in Africa are still about 26 percent of the total population, with almost 900 million people unconnected.

Apart from Nigeria and Ghana, it also plans to expand to other neighbouring countries like Cote d’Ivoire and Togo.

Ifeanyi Okonkwo, the co-founder, and chief operating officer at Tizeti, highlighted the increased submarine cable investments in Africa to date, and the absence of middle-mile and last-mile infrastructure that moves the capacity where it is needed.

“With Tizeti’s new infrastructure build-out across West Africa, it plans to bridge the digital divide and bring more Africans online via its unlimited service offering.

“We believe that Africa offers the most significant potential demand for broadband expansion, and we have looked at their populations, their relative contributions to GDP, the prevalence of higher and tertiary institutions, and other pool factors,” Okonkwo said.

Tizeti also launched new connectivity offerings, Tizeti Turbo Connect, which provides up to 150MBPS fiber-connected capacity to homes and offices, for N 60,000 ($85), and a new technology that allows it to deliver up to 1000MBPS.

The company also announced new energy initiatives that minimize diesel cost consumption with solar panels and wind turbines across its base stations.