Fix Our Networks

Nigerian mobile internet service is terribly bad. It need to be fixed.

We've been running pilot on Tiketmobile for some time now and I've not been directly responsible. However, when we were not going as fast as we had projected, I decided to push for installation on everyday people's phones, wherever I find myself and observe usage. The major observation from this is that the internet networks are terrible. All of them.

We created Tiketmobile out of CC Hub where the network is beautiful. Yes, you can get a device, connect to the wifi and test your app. In 3 seconds, the app has pulled start-up data from the remote server and is running fine. When you get outside, the story is different. A transaction which would take about 10 secs or less would now take some 5 to 15 mins. This is very bad. Everytime this happens, I always start opera-mini on the phones to check if it's a fault in Tiketmobile's architecture, but it is always the same thing.

It's terrible.

Telcos have to upgrade their equipments, or whatever it is they need to do for things to work better. Internet applications that don't require constant use or that's not social app would find it really hard to garner users in this kind of situation. If anyone can reach them, they should tell them.

Maybe it's Lagos only, because Kennedy said network was better when he was at Abuja. The network on the streets here is terrible and needs to be fixed.

Cheers.

P.S.
If you have a Java ME device and you want to try Tiketmobile out, visit http://getjar.com/tiketmobile and download it. A change would be pushed-up tomorrow though. It's just a change on UX, based on observations and nothing special, so it's OK to have this.