Airtel was the fastest mobile operator among the network providers in Nigeria in the first three months of 2021, according to the latest Speedtest Intelligence data from Ookla.
The second-largest internet provider in Nigeria beat competition from MTN, Globacom, and 9Mobile with a speed score of 27.18 on modern chipsets.
Being the fastest network operator in Nigeria also meant that Airtel had the lowest delay or latency at 39 milliseconds (ms) within the period.
The telecom operator also beat the other networks on Consistency Score. Mobile Consistency Score measures the number of incidences (viewed as a percentage) of a provider’s samples equal or exceeds both a download threshold of 5 Mbps and an upload threshold of 1 Mbps.
In the first quarter of 2021, Airtel had the highest Consistency Score in Nigeria with 84.7 percent of results showing at least a 5 Mbps minimum download speed and 1 Mbps minimum upload speed.
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However, mobile subscribers needed to have an iPhone 12 Pro Max 5G to fully maximise the speed advantage Airtel or MTN which is the second fastest has on offer.
Ookla’s analysis of performance on some of the fastest phones in Nigeria demonstrated the iPhone 12 Pro Max 5G showed the fastest mean download speed during Q1 2021 with 36.01 Mbps.
The price of an iPhone 12 Pro Max on Jumia, Nigeria’s largest e-commerce platform, is N619,999. And given that Apple has about 6 percent of the mobile devices market in Nigeria, it is highly unlikely that the Airtel speed is accessible to many mobile subscribers in the country.
In other words, millions of subscribers who are limited by less expensive smartphones still struggle with Internet speed.
The Ookla report in examining the percentage of an operator’s known locations where a device has access to 4G LTE, also found that MTN has the best 4G availability in Nigeria.
At the same time, mobile subscribers are more likely to download documents faster in Port Harcourt than they would in any other city in Nigeria. The data found that Port Harcourt showed the fastest mean mobile download speed among Nigeria’s most populous cities during Q1 2021 at 23.02 Mbps.
