Airtel Nigeria has been rated the fastest network in the telecom broadband category. This rating was made public recently by Ookla, a global leader in mobile and broadband network intelligence, testing applications and technology.

 

According to Ookla’s latest Q3 2021 Market report on the state of Nigeria’s mobile and fixed networks, Airtel Nigeria had a speed of 33.43. This makes it the fastest among broadband networks available in the country. This is a 17% growth rate from the numbers it recorded in the first half of 2021.

 

The figures show steady, significant growth from the 27.18 it recorded in the first quarter of 2021 and the 28.82 speed score recorded in the second quarter of the same year.

Coming second as fastest network speed in this report is MTN Nigeria. The yellow network recorded a speed score rating of 18.70, 25.87 and 26.15 for the first, second and third quarters, respectively. Other telecom brands in the Nigerian market, Glo and 9mobile recorded speed score ratings as low as 11.72 and 10.21 respectively.

 

Airtel speed score can be attributed to data consumption by its subscribers. In Q1 2021, its data revenue soared by 26% to hit $152M, up from $120M. This data revenue accounted for about 35.4% of total revenue in the year. Average data consumption per user also rose from 1.9 GB per month to 3.2 GB per month.

 

Likewise, in Q2, data revenue rose by 48.8% to hit $171M, up from $152M. This represented the highest growth percentage witnessed by any segment of the telco. The growth was driven by a 41.5% growth in ARPU for data and supported by a 42.2% increase in data consumption per customer as average data consumption rose to 3.8 GB per month.

 

Considering that data revenue continues to record impressive growths this shows a lot of Nigerians are trusting the network for their internet access.

Rating the consistency score, Airtel overtook MTN to become the broadband with the highest consistency score on mobile. The broadband recorded 89.4% consistency score compared to its closest competitor MTN that had 82.7%.

 

This is a 7% increase from the previous quarter when Airtel had a consistency score of 82.5%, which was 0.9% lower than MTN’s.