Hi,

I am an Australian whose father currently lives in Nigeria and is forever complaining about his slow internet connection and asked me to look into it and what possible options can be done.

Currently he rely's on a connection set up by work in his house (56k dialup which then goes to be queued at the satalite before it finally reaches to the internet in the US) which as you can imagine is quite slow (not uncommon for pages to simply stop loading and timing out)

Anyways my question is what is available for broadband in Eket in Akwa Ibom, I presume satellite is the only real technology available as the phone lines seem too unreliable for xDSL technologys?

Thanks

Hunter, I'll help you look into this issue.

To access the Internet, I use the Internet service provided by a '[I]Fixed Wireless[/i]' phone operator (Multilinks). It's probably much better than a land-line modem but there's nothing you can do about the satellite delay problem.

I get a speed of up to 8 kilobytes/second

even that would be a big improvement over the current setup
Wether it is available is probably a big issue though...

His budget would budget would stretch up to about $150 (Australian dollars) or about $130 US (not sure how much niara that is, i think its 15000) a month for a good broadband connection and probably about $30 (Australian dollars) or about $25 US (I think around N3000)

Thanks

I have been trying to use Google to get the information. No luck so far! We will need to contact someone who lives in Uyo.

So what does your dad do in Nigeria?

he works for exonn mobile oil exploration (probably not the most liked people in nigeria) :/

Seun, I get what you are asking. I get service at home via Stallionet, an ISP in Uyo. It is a wireless connnection, and is really fast compared to what is obtained locally. I suggest you contact victor@ stallionet.com. They also service Eket ...

I'll take a look at that option thanks for the idea

[me=Hidden_Hunter]notices he's downloading at 800KB/s a second teehee [/me]

(I'm spoiled in australia :S )

Armani, thanks for the information.

Their website, obviously is at: www.stallionet.com

yeah i took a look at them (shame ISDN isn't an option, i have a cisco 2611 router that has a nice ISDN card in it )

Internet is very expensive in nigeria it seems I presume Residential - Infinitaz is the 8kb's a second plan?

The bandwidth on Infinitaz is probably shared, so you won't know what you're getting until you test it.

That's always a bit risky though, I'll get him to ask around at work and see if any of the Nigerians that don't live in the company housing estate (and hence don't have Internet provided) use it.

Well, I noticed that one thing nobody mentioned is the issue of cost of the provision.

There are VSAT solutions that he can get for as low as 350thousand Naira and monthly bandwidth for as low as 60thousand naira.

I don't know what in particular he is using it for.Luxiury or WORK??

just a luxury, he might be able to write it off as a company expense though

axeprince: There are VSAT solutions that he can get for as low as 350 thousand Naira and monthly bandwidth for as low as 60 thousand naira.

24 hour access using Multilinks/Starcomms costs 15,000 naira per month . The days when an individual will need to get a VSAT for reliable Internet access are over!

I am not sure your last statement is "general".

So what happens to places like Abuja that doesn't have Starcomm or Multilinks??

Reltel also has such a service. Whatever PTOs are in Abuja could launch similar service anytime. VSAT providers should recognize the next wave and embrace it. You can't insist on charging people 300k for what they can get for 30k, or 60k monthly when another person is ready to offer 15k! You can't do that forever.

hi,
i am victor from stallionet, stallionet can serve you father at eket, all you have to do is get in touch with me by mail victor@stallionet.com, and give me details on your fathers location in eket, then i can send you a startu cost.

thanks

The PTOs that are offering Internet Access are only scamming the licenced ISPs, very soon ISPs will be taking up the case with NCC.

I can only envisage the demsie of Internet Access by these PTOs in the horizon.

what i am using now is multilinks wireless dial-up, but the speed is slow, because i have to download a lot of documents from the web. Is there any boardband connection in Lagos?

thanks!