Nigeria is a country in West Africa with a population of over 150 Million, the most populous in Africa. With this statistics, it comes as no surprise that Nigeria has been listed as having the highest number of Internet users on the continent  and 10th in the world. However, Nigeria was conspicuously absent from the list of top countries with broadband internet users.

The quality of internet access in Nigeria is, at best, extremely unreliable. Most individuals get on the internet via the mobile networks ISPs who, despite false claims of mobile broadband speeds, can hardly boast of 2.5G (GPRS) speeds in most places, if at all. And all these, unfortunately, at a high premium!  Nigeria has the most market share for mobile phone browsing in the world, with over 31% of all internet content being accessed from mobiles. More details can also be found on Opera website. A bulk of the remaining 69% of users accessing the internet also do so via “3G” USB modems provided by these mobile networks. As of today, broadband speed is almost non-existent in Nigeria, perhaps only available to a very select few that i do not know of. You can read more about the state of Nigerian Mobile sector here.

Of the mobiles used in browsing the web, the Nokia brand of phones are still the market leaders by a very long mile, thanks to its perceived reliability and cheapness of some of its low end phones. But how well are the other mobiles by other manufacturers faring? I was particularly interested in knowing the rate of usage of the iPad and android tablets in Nigeria. A very fair way of getting this statistics is from the mobile internet usage reports.

Statcounter rates the number of users of  iOS devices (iPhones and iPads) more than the collection of Android devices users in Nigeria. Could this be true?