In 2019, LTE coverage extended to many cities beyond the Lagos metropolis. All of the four major Communications Service Providers (9Mobile, Airtel, Globacom and MTN) now have 4G LTE coverage in substantial parts of cities such as  Ibadan, Abuja, Benin, Warri, Port Harcourt, Akure, Ado Ekiti, Sapele, Ugheli, Maiduguri  and others. NIWBQR reports are available for Port Harcourt, Ado Ekiti and Ibadan while our coverage quality maps are available for most, if not all, of the areas with LTE coverage.

High packet delay latency continues to be a problem. Outside of Lagos, where  MTN maintains good latency numbers, as shown in figure 1 below, latency remains high in all the networks.

Fig 1

During the year, we introduced a new service, Radio Frequency Coverage Quality mapping. Our coverage quality maps show MTN with best coverage quality in most covered areas while Airtel has the worst. However these maps alone do not tell the whole story.  Airtel, despite having the worst coverage quality, ranks second only to MTN in our NIWBQR reports which are based on the ranking of overall quality of 4G LTE service as determined by our ranking criteria.

The best all-around performance from every service provider occurs in Lagos. There, every Service Provider have substantial LTE coverage with MTN coverage quality being highest. Glo and 9Mobile have good RF coverage quality while Airtel has overall worst coverage quality even though it comes second in our NIWBQR rankings.