Tuesday, July 23, 2013

How Telecommunication Company In Nigeria Defraud Non-Blackberry Users

It is nothing short of day light robbery that have been happening to Nigerians. Telecommunications industry have decided to favor a set of smartphone users (Blackberry) why robbing other smartphone users (Nokia, iPhone, and Android devices). It is almost like saying its favoritism, serious neglect and siphoning.

The telecommunications company do this by giving Blackberry users more internet data size compared to other smartphone users.

For example, a BIS subscription of N1000 gets you a minimum of 1GB internet data while the same amount won't even get you 300mb of data.  This is true for all network operators in the country.

The question is, Why is there such a data bundle gap between Blackberry users and non Blackberry users?  Is it that they have more customer base than other smartphone users? Is it that Blackberry users  are more important to them than  non-Blackberry users?
Considering the fact that most non-Blackberry smartphones even consume more Internet data than Blackberry devices, is this a way to keep giving little data so that these people can keep subscribing to tiny internet packages that won't last up to two weeks? 

Obviously, this more than meet the eye! Its robbery and rip off of the highest order.

According to a document published online by Punch Nigeria on January 8th 2013 which you can find here, only 25 per cent of Nigeria’s over 105 million mobile telephone subscribers use smartphones. Going by this value, 25 percent when converted to actual numbers is translated to 26.25 million smartphones.

The study further exposed that 59% of Nigerians use phones with basic features and 16% use phones with advance features.

According to another online publication by Business Day on January 24th 2012 which you can also find here, Information  from senior personnel inside Nigeria ’s GSM industry  show that  there were about about 2.4  million Blackberry devices in the country’s four GSM networks MTN, Globacom, Airtel and Etisalat, as at December 2011.  This is up from about 925,000  about a year ago.

At the time of this writing, hypothetically, its possible to say that this value of 2.4 million Blackberry devices in the country would have increased to about say 4 - 6 million. 

Now, 4 - 6 million Blackberry devices is still a far cry from 26.25 million smartphones in Nigeria. This suggests that there are more smartphones that are not Blackberry in hooked to telecoms companies in Nigeria.

According to a report from BGR, 3% of Blackberry users globally are Nigerians. Definitely, Blackberry would do everything in their power to keeps these user base from declining by doing a lot of things.
Being that as it may, could it be that Blackberry is subsidizing Internet rate that makes it so cheap in Nigeria with more data or its just a decision that telecoms companies in Nigeria decided to take on to keep more customers to the Blackberry platform?

Either way, this activity is not favorable to non-Blackberry users as we they also make a huge amount of their customer base too. In fact as someone said, Telecommunications company in Nigeria are defrauding non-Blackberry users.

I would like these telecoms companies in Nigeria to look into this matter and do something about it before it gets critical; because right now, a whole lot of people are complaining about the seeming increase of Internet data rates with tiny data bundle that reduces productivity and also have impact on the growth and adoption of other smartphones: Nokia Lumia, Samsung, HTC, Tecno and the likes in the country.

Of course, I don't have all these answers to all these, however, if you do share your opinions and thoughts in the comments section below


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