Nigerian Internet Providers Are Killing Tech Startups With Dubious Internet Plan

No matter how bright your Internet Tech idea is, without good and favorable Internet subscription to keep you online while you work it out, it may never see the light of the day. I’ve tried all MTN Internet Bundles, all Etisalat Internet Bundles, Glo Internet Bundles and that of Airtel, and come to the conclusion that they are all the same thing — None of them is good enough to run serious Internet business on a budget.

I can’t forget the day I spent almost a whole day writing a very lengthy blog post — finished my writings, edited, formatted and did all the necessary thing I knew I should do. Then hit the ‘Publish’ button to get my article published only to discover that Internet connection was very poor and unable to power the Publish button, forcing the browser to return “Can not find server” despite that I was on MTN 3G with full network signals. When the page was reloaded, the entire Blog Post that took me several hours to write was gone!

Another day, I had an urgent message to send — my agent needed the message not later than 5minutes to be able to process some publications. Confidently I assured him the message will be in his inbox in the next five minutes, then I fired my Etisalat modem to attach a document of less that 800kb and get the message sent. 6 hours later, the document was still struggling to attach and at the end, the deal was lost!!

How about the day I had an important idea to work on — the prospect of the idea was so exciting that I needed not to waste any extra seconds. Then I powered my Laptop, reached for my MTN Interface to get connected and starts working on my idea but, MTN was unable to connect for the whole day!

These experiences of mine are not just one off experience suffered occasionally due to some unforeseen occurrences, it is a regular experience that every Internet user in Nigeria has to go through almost on daily basis and none of the Mobile Broadband operators seems to care.

You may be wondering why I used the word ‘Dubious’ for these Nigeria Broadband Providers Internet subscription charges? Dubious because that’s what they are! It may interest you to know that the amount of money we pay for 30days and are restricted to 5GB on average speed of less than 2mps is almost twice higher than what The USA pay per month on Unlimited bandwidth and get average speed of over 30mps.

Most of the times, you pay for the 5GB monthly data plan for N8,000, you wasted several hours to connect, you finally get connected only to discover your network Isn’t browsing — at the end, you manage to use only few days out of your 30days subscription, and when the 30days time is reached you wouldn’t get even a second extra… What happens to contract?

How else do you describe being dubious than when a network advertised and promised unlimited download, made people to buy and then secretly apply Data Throttle which makes it difficult for users to even access the network let alone use unlimited bandwidth?

The MTN plans are indeed very limited! Imagine I bought two hours to update my software that usually takes 200MBs. The moment I starts downloading and crossed 100MBs of data, the MTN speed connection will be dramatically ‘Throttled’  down to 7kps – 15kps on 3G Network! And these speeds won’t let me finish the download with the little remaining times. So I end up subscribing to the plan again and the cycle continues!

How do you think Tech Start ups with very limited fund will survive in an environment where internet connection is charged at a very high premium, and on limited bandwidth and internet speed?

Why would the networks promise unlimited downloads only to dubiously apply Data Throttle when you reach few megabytes? Isn’t that false advertising? And no one seems to do anything about it?

Why would the networks give us limited data bundle and pegged it with time limit in which we must use it either we like it or not, else it will expire?

Take a look at the Nigeria Networks data plans and compare it with the USA networks data plans, then see how we’re being ripped off in this country. And USA is not even the country with the best internet plans, other countries like Latvia, Czech Republic, etc even has better data plans.

You noticed that Nigeria network plans are relatively the same, they hover around the same price and same maximum bandwidth restrictions. Their average prices for 5GB, 30Days is N8,000

Now, compare it with that of The USA:
With 29 dollars per moths, Comcast gives their subscribers 30Days of Unlimited Download (if you like, use 100Million GB) at the speed of 20mps! 29 dollars is equivalent to just N4,500 Monthly

Verizon Ultimate plan has the speed of 300mb! Such speed is fast enough to download anything in less than a second. With such speed, you can download 5hours HD Movie within 5 seconds!

Haven’t we suffered enough? What we are asking in this country is that MTN, Glo, Etisalat, Airtel, Starcomms, etc should give us unlimited data plans at reasonable price monthly subscription and on high internet speed.

Or allow us buy data and use on high speed Internet when we like it — E.g: I can buy 100GB from any of the network and use it when I like without time restriction. If I like, I can use it over the next three years just the same way we use our airtime recharges, depending on my need.

Without these, it will be difficult for any Tech Start Up who is working on limited budget to survive in this kind of environment. Please share the article.

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