According to Nigeria Communications Week, Nigeria internet ecosystem has recorded a major milestone with the exchange of 110 gigabytes per second bandwidth of traffic locally. This shows an increase of 10,000 percent over the last five years and also, a 40 percent boost in telecommunications operators and internet service providers (ISPs) traffic in the country.
It was revealed that in June 2018, the country was exchanging 30 percent of all its internet traffic locally, this means that it added 10 percent in five months as against the 20 percent it added between 2015 and June 2018.
Muhammed Rudman, managing director, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria (IXPN) told Nigeria Communications Week that the growth could be attributed to the level of awareness among Nigerians, the impact of local hosting on the economy, cost of the internet as well as quality of service.
“A lot of Nigerians are now hosting their servers locally that we at the Exchange have attracted because of our huge size some of the big players in internet content into the country, such as Google, Facebook and Akamai and presently we are trying to bring other bigger ones into the country. A major contributor to this huge increase came from Facebook which has fully connected to the exchange.
He added that most of the government websites are now hosted locally as well as private organizations. “But in terms of real content such as videos, Nollywood videos are not yet hosted in the country. This accounts for substantially what the other African countries would be searching for in Nigeria, unfortunately, this is not yet hosted in the country. We hope that the likes of IrokoTV will start hosting locally.
“Videos are heavy, they occupy a lot of space and the cost of hosting in Nigeria is still on the high side, considering the volume it brings into the country, it might cost them far more than what they are currently paying internationally. “Secondly, the movie industry has not taken advantage of the internet for now; aside IrokoTV there is no other local internet platform that hosts Nollywood videos.
“More so, there is no demand to some extent on online videos. Nigerians are not watching videos online like downloading of a whole movie to watch because the capacity is not there, for instance, if you want to download a movie on your mobile phone to watch and the movie is heavy it will take your data and data is expensive in Nigeria so you might eventually not try it. But, if broadband becomes pervasive in the country and the industry matured they will start hosting locally just like Netflix in America where everybody is watching Netflix just because they have high-speed internet access,” he said.