The mobile telephony and internet markets in Africa

The International Telecommunication Union recently published their Information Society Statistical Profiles 2009 – Africa. The 76 page document details their statistical analysis of the progress of telephony and internet in Africa in the ten years up to the end of 2008. And guess what? Nigeria ranks highly in the fastest growing categories for mobile subscription, and internet and wireless broadband internet connection. Again, this isn’t surprising, as a country we are effectively an African superpower.

But then:

Before we get carried away with this, we do need to pay attention, relative to the size of our population, we have a long way to go. We only have 7.8 internet users per 100 inhabitants, while tiny countries like the Seychelles and Mauritus have 37.8 and 29.9 respectively. Only 5.1% of Nigerian households have a computer and our bandwidth puts us in league with Zimbabwe and DR Congo (both countries currently in turmoil compared to us) at less than 100 bits per internet user.

That is Lolobloggs writing for NigeriansTalk. The full post is here.