South Africa has Africa’s fastest internet speed, Port Harcourt is first in Nigeria
South Africa has Africa’s fastest internet speed, Port Harcourt is first in Nigeria
With a speed of 44.60Mbps, South Africa outperforms all other African countries in the ranking of countries with the fastest internet speed in the world. The country is ranked 56th in the world. According to the Ookla Speedtest Global Index June report, this is the case.
Using Ookla's Speedtest Global Index, which aggregates network speed tests from more than 10,000 high-performance servers in more than 190 countries, network performance can be improved.
Morocco comes in at number 63 with a download speed of 40.07Mbps, followed by Tunisia at number 70 with a download speed of 34.22Mbps. Nigeria, Mauritius, Angola, Ethiopia, and Egypt are the only African countries listed in the top 100, with internet speeds of 33.98 Mbps and 27.30 Mbps, respectively. Only nine (9) African countries are listed in the top 100, with the others being Cameroon and Bostwana.
African countries with the fastest mobile internet speeds (greater than 27 Mbps) include South Africa, Morocco, and Tunisia. On the other hand, Ghana (132) and Zimbabwe (134) have the slowest internet speeds in the world, with 12.69Mbps and 13.23Mbps, respectively.
Port Harcourt is on the leading chart
In Nigeria, Port Harcourt, which is home to Nigeria's second-largest port and the country's second-largest city, has the fastest internet speeds in the country, surpassing Lagos, Ibadan, and Kano. The coastal city has a download speed of 26.34 megabytes per second (Mbps), which is significantly higher than the 24.15Mbps recorded in Lagos, Africa's top startup city, which is the second fastest in the continent.
Four out of five cities had download speeds of more than 20Mbps, according to the report, which highlighted the fastest mean mobile download speed among Nigeria's most populous cities during the second quarter of the year.
Kano is ranked second on the list with 24.75Mbps, followed by Ibadan, which was ranked fourth with 20.66Mbps. During this time period, Benin City had the lowest recorded speed of 16.73Mbps.
Nigeria dropped one position to 99th on the global ranking, thanks to a download speed of 22.91 Mbps. The top three positions in the world, on the other hand, remain unchanged.
With a mobile broadband speed of 193.51Mbps, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is comfortably positioned at the top of the rankings. South Korea comes in second place with 180.48 Mbps, followed by Qatar with 171.76 Mbps.
Norway (171.76 Mbps) and Cyprus (161.80 Mbps), both newcomers to the list of 140 countries covered by the report, round out the top five. The United States is ranked 18th with 88.08 megabits per second, while the United Kingdom is ranked 23rd with 78.81 megabits per second.
Airtel has the fastest internet in Nigeria
Despite the fact that Airtel has the fastest internet speed in Nigeria, a breakdown of Internet speed in Nigeria reveals that while the download speed for mobile phones is 22.91Mbps, the upload speed is even lower at only 9.68Mbps.
According to the latest available data, the download speed for fixed broadband is 17.05Mbps and the upload speed is 15.28Mbps. According to the findings of this report, while mobile internet may offer faster download speeds, fixed broadband is more dependable.
Airtel was the fastest mobile operator among top providers in Nigeria in Q2 2021, according to the speed test report, with a Speed Score of 28.82 on modern chipsets, according to the speed test report.
Using a speed score of 25.78, MTN, Nigeria's largest mobile operator, comes in second place overall. Globacom and 9mobile have the slowest speeds, with scores of 10.35 and 9.49, respectively, on the speed test. Compared to Airtel and MTN, this represents a decrease of more than half the speed score. A breakdown reveals that MTN leads in terms of consistency, with an 83.4 percent score. This means that approximately 83 percent of the results were found to have at least a 5 Mbps minimum download speed and a 1 Mbps minimum upload speed or higher.
Airtel is in second place with an 82.5 percent score, followed by Globacom and 9mobile, which received 64.1 percent and 46.4 percent scores, respectively.
However, when it came to latency, 9mobile surprised everyone by having the lowest latency, which was 44 milliseconds, during the second quarter. MTN and Airtel had the slowest internet speeds in Africa, with 48 milliseconds. In conclusion, internet speeds in Africa continue to lag far behind the global mobile average of 55.34 megabits per second. The internet speed in Nigeria is even worse, with a speed of 22.91Mbps, which is approximately half that of South Africa (44.60Mbps).
Despite the low average, the progress made in countries such as Mauritius demonstrates that expanding high-speed mobile broadband beyond major cities to the last mile is critical to achieving faster internet in African countries like Kenya and Tanzania.
While Nigeria and Ghana are still struggling to expand 4G coverage, South Africa's 5G subscribers have already surpassed an estimated 90,000, according to official figures. In fact, according to Africa Analysis, the number of 5G users in the country is expected to reach 11 million by the year 2025.
Nigeria is not without hope, as major telecommunications providers such as MTN have announced plans to invest a significant amount of money in infrastructure to support the development of broadband services. In a similar vein, the government has launched a broadband strategy, with the goal of reducing internet costs by half by 2025. Based on the current state of play in Africa's telecom sector, more African countries are on track to break into the top 100 of Ookla's Speedtest ranking before the end of the year.
