Brief History of LTE Deployment in Nigeria
The first deployment of LTE in Nigeria was in 2014 by Smile Telecom in Ibadan.
By 2016, Ntel, Bitflux and Smile had initiated efforts to deploy LTE in Lagos. Shortly after, the major national MNOs joined the effort.
By 2018, all of the four major network operators had LTE footprint in substantial parts of the country. This year has only seen increased 4G LTE coverage in Nigeria.
During the fourth quarter of this year, MTN began offering commercial 5G service using, primarily, its own routers.
“Unfortunately, unlike 2G and 3G networks, the regulatory body, NCC, has not established KPIs for monitoring the quality of the 4G networks or documented significant efforts made to encourage ongoing maintenance of high quality for these networks”, Enextgen Wireless Limited lamented in this report.
“The impact of efforts being made to minimize vandalism and improve the quality of public infrastructure can only be appreciated through ongoing monitoring. This is important because mobile broadband is indispensable to a vast majority of small enterprises and ordinary residents of the country.
“We have been carrying on the responsibility of monitoring these networks since 2016. We have evolved our process to where we now have a unique platform for not only monitoring the networks but also facilitating the efforts of interested network operators to maintain the best networks possible, a unique asset not available to other network operators in other countries”.
The 2022 4G LTE Spectrum Utilization Efficiency by MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9Mobile report focuses on benchmarking the quality of 4G LTE networks in Lagos and Ibadan – cities where Enextgen Wireless engineers have most consistently collected data in all four major networks.
“However, we have data in substantial parts of the country on MTN and one or two other networks, including data from some of the remote areas”.
The report available to TechEconomy uses data from the company’s Enterprise EMETRICS, which is available, by subscription, to interested MNOs, to rank the four network operators according to the quality of 4G LTE signal and packet delays:
Overview:
In the following pages, Enextgen Wireless ranked the quality of mobile RF signal used to provide 4G LTE services by the four major network operators in Lagos and Ibadan
“We base the rankings for EMETRICS according to the ratio of (green + blue + yellow) METRICS bins to (green + blue + yellow) RSRP bins.
“We base the ranking for Latency on the ratio of (green + blue + yellow) Latency bins to the overall latency bins (green, blue, yellow, brown, red)”, the report reads.
In each case, the one with the highest quotient ranks the highest:
