Grace Ashiru
A few months after signing a contract with the Nigerian government to provide the service to the West African nation. SpaceX, an Elon Musk-founded space technology company, said that Starlink, its satellite internet service, is now commercially available in Nigeria.
The service is now online in Nigeria, and also the first African nation to do so. According to our research, the 46th country overall. The firm announced this in a tweet on Monday.
With more than 400,000 users globally and permission to operate on all seven continents, the service can deliver internet speeds of up to 200 Mbps to any location in the world.
According to information from Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index, as of December 2022, Nigeria’s fixed broadband download speed was 11.40 Mbps and upload speed was 9.87 Mbps, while its mobile internet download speed was 21.54 Mbps and upload speed was 10.10 Mbps.
According to Speedtest Intelligence, MTN and Airtel, Nigeria’s two leading telecom providers, have median download speeds of 21.71Mbps and 22.42Mbps, respectively. Other ISPs, like ipNX, advertise speeds of up to 150 Mbps for their fiber-optic service for residential clients and up to 500 Mbps for their service for commercial customers. Their monthly rates range from 40,000 to 160,000, with the cost of the hardware ranging from 45,000 to 70,000.
You wouldn’t expect a satellite internet service like Starlink, which boasts download rates of up to 200 Mbps, to be inexpensive. Nigeria was one of the nations with the highest cost of the Starlink service, according to our recent analysis of the service’s price in 15 chosen countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. This analysis was based on our research from the SpaceX-owned satellite broadband internet service.
