You have probably read my rant about how Glo HSI has been disappointing at my end in recent times. But the unreliability did not affect just me alone. All five members of my production team (spread across four states of the Federation) have had nothing but horrible things to say about Glo internet in the last few months. Glo HSI effectively crippled our work for the period we used it.
So, the team switched to Etisalat’s EasyBlaze, which has been significant better than Glo. But it hasn’t been without its hassles either. Easyblaze manages to fail me often enough to make the experience unbearable. When 95% of what you do relies on fast, stable internet, it all adds up.
As far as I can tell, Smile 4G is still the most reliable consumer internet service in Nigeria till date. It is much faster and fails much less often than the others do. And it is getting more and more affordable. For example, it is now more affordable than packages from Etisalat and MTN.
MTN is somewhere between Glo and Etisalat’s reliability, in my experience. And that means it isn’t good enough either for me to rely on for daily productivity and communications.
And Airtel internet? Please. Listening to my wife’s daily complaints about their service (and how long it often takes my chat messages to deliver to her), looking in Airtel’s direction would be like jumping out of the frying pan into the pits of hell. In my experience, it is the least reliable data service of the four mobile networks.
Forget subscriber figures. In my opinion, the battle for reliable consumer internet in Nigeria is between between MTN, Etisalat and Smile, in that order, with Smile leading the pack by a wide margin.
PS: Yes; I know that internet performance and reliability in Nigeria is generally location dependent, but the above is my experience. Do feel free to share your experience in the comments section below.