Warning to Airtel Nigeria Internet users

Airtel has a pattern "chopping" or exhausting the entire credit balance on your phone or modem if your data plan ends. This has happened to many people.

In my case, I got a notice that my plan would auto-renew in a few days, so I added 8000 naira credit to allow the auto-renewal. The next day, the plan ended because the gigabytes were exhausted. Airtel did not renew the plan despite the credit on my phone, they simply charged me the whole 8000 for "browsing without a plan," while never informing me that I was doing so.

Despite several useless phone calls to customer service (where they did not even know where my city Jos was), an hour in person with the local customer service, and an appeal to the manager, Airtel insisted that I was at fault, and they would not give a refund.

I know some other providers (MTN, I think) will drop the data connection until you explicitly say you want to continue without a plan, but Airtel conveniently "forgets" to let you know; you simply move with no notice from operating under your plan to exhausting your credit balance. While Airtel has provided good service, this fact would make me cautious about recommending it. I understand that Glo is also very good, but don't know how they handle this billing issue. Furthermore, Glo's Plans are cheaper with 7,500 naira for 8 GB as opposed to 8,000 naira for 5 GB with Airtel.

How we use FrontlineSMS

Jos, Nigeria has been in the news recently because of riots in November that killed hundreds of people. This was the second such episode since 2001, and the situation remains tense. Besides this, violent crime has increased rapidly in the past 4 years, with frequent robberies by armed gangs of up to 20 or more men.

Part of our response as a group of missions in Jos has been to strengthen our communications network, and FrontlineSMS has become a key part of that network. The mobile phone is the basic means of communication in Jos, where there are few if any functioning land lines, and where Internet access is still expensive and spotty. During the November crisis, we noticed that voice calls on the mobile network rarely connected, probably because of congestion, while SMS messages got through well.

With FrontlineSMS, we have so far developed a system with these features:

• Anyone can text the system and receive a response with the current status message. In a crisis, this could contain warnings, instructions, announcements and so on.
• Besides this "on demand" capability, we keep one list of users ("text alerts") who receive broadcast alerts.
• Anyone can join the "text alerts" group by sending the request as a text message to the system. We ask people to send the message ".join " followed by their name. At this point, FrontlineSMS cannot automatically include the name when the phone number is added to a group, but we hope that could be added in the future.
• We maintain other user lists such as compound security leaders, crisis management team, and so on. Anyone can broadcast a message to the crisis management team by prefixing a text message with a code that causes FrontlineSMS to forward the message to team members.
• The system sends outgoing SMS message through the Internet when it is available. They're sent to the Clickatell, which routes them to the actual SMS network. Clickatell is is very fast and inexpensive. We can send about 80 messages per minute this way, far more than is currently possible if we were to send messages directly onto the mobile phone network.
• FrontlineSMS is compatible with many mobile phones and modems. We are using a Huawei E170 modem.

Real Life Examples

Fortunately, we have not had actual rioting since we set up the system. However, there have been times when it has been very useful to send warnings and to raise the alert level. Here are some actual examples:

@Alerts: Jos is tense, please avoid downtown today.

@Security: X and Y have been robbed tonight & report the robbers took their Toyota Land cruiser and muttered something about Hillcrest on the way out.

@Alerts 20Feb 655pm. Serious rioting reported in Bauchi. No problems in Jos. Obey curfew, avoid areas that could be troublesome.

22 Feb 8am. *** Rioting on Friday Bauchi, churches & mosques burned. Now controlled. Keep on alert. Report signif news this num or ur security rep.

SecGrp: Some rumors are going around about unrest planned for Friday, .... Email or txt me if you know more. --Mike

Effectiveness

The system has worked quite well. The most serious limitations have been

• The interfaces (modem and Internet) have had a tendency to lock up, failing to receive messages, and have to be re-initialized manually.
• Message delivery is sometimes delayed for hours, occasionally more than a day. This is a fault of the local network and has nothing to do with FrontlineSMS or Clickatell.

Summary

FrontlineSMS has served us very well as a well to communicate quickly by SMS. We would recommend it for others in similar situations.

Mobile Internet Services in Jos, Nigeria

As I said in the previous post, I've been researching the mobile ISPs that are currently available in Jos. It's a dynamic situation, with several companies entering or about to enter the playing field, and with promises of broadband 3G service to come "soon". Since 3G is already available in some cities in Nigeria, we hope the "soon" is actually in the near future, this year sometime.

As I said in the previous post, I am summarizing all my information as I gather it, on the Mobile ISPs page in the Living in Nigeria wiki. So go there for more details and for more recent news. Add information if you have it!

The summary at this point is:

• Although advertising as high speed, MTN offers low-speed (GPRS) service with a variety of monthly and day plans (from a few hours to a full 24 hours). They plan eventually to have broadband (GSM family, UMTS)
• Multi-links and Zoom offer medium-speed (1x) connections. They plan to have broadband (CDMA family, EVDO). I don't know about actually-observed operating speeds.
  • Multi-links requires you to buy a 21,000 naira phone or 16,000 naira (unavailable) modem.
  • Zoom requires you to buy a 3,000 naira phone or 10,000 naira modem.
  • Multi-links and Zoom both have a variety of plans, but only Multi-links has day plans.
  • Zain and Glo do not offer intermediate range (1x) service and don't seem to have any attractive features at this point.
• My personal experience with MTN on only a few occasions has been that it is not worthwhile (too slow).
• I have heard from one person each for MTN, Zoom, and Multi-links that the service has been fair (MTN, Zoom) to good (Multi-links).

My friend who has been testing Zoom (with the rather bulky 1x/EVDO modem) told me today that it's not tolerable for browsing, as far as he is concerned, with very low speeds at times. However, he pointed out that it's ok for email since that can trickle in at any speed.

It is very important to remember that while the companies advertise a connection speed and while the hardware could in fact support that speed, the actual speed is still limited by how much bandwidth the company chooses to pour into the pipeline. Bandwidth is expensive and so far the companies are not actually giving out as much as they could, or so it appears to the consumer.

Using a Blackberry phone in the bush in Nigeria

I plan to post a couple of blog entries soon about using mobile internet services in Nigeria, specifically in Jos rather than in the big cities. If you're interested, you can see and contribute to the wiki page where I'm gathering and organizing the information I have. Meanwhile, this note came from Tom Crago. He is having better luck with a Blackberry phone in the village than I am having with an MTN modem in Jos.

We are using a Blackberry 8830 World Edition cell phone in Nigeria which we obtained and are paying for in the USA. We are currently in the small village of Kwarhi, on the grounds of EYN's Kulp Bible College. This is about 13 km west of Mubi in Adamawa State. By comparision, Jos is a huge metro service area.

The phone is designed to search for the best available service connection wherever we may be. At different times it has connected to MTN or CelTel (now Zain) while we have been in Nigeria. Here in Kwarhi, and in Jos while we were there, it has connected to CelTel's GPRS system. It took about one minute to download the wiki page you reference in your article.

The phone was purchased in the US for 99 dollars, and we got a 70 dollar rebate. Net cost about 29 dollars. Price probably can't be matched now.

We added the global service to this phone just before leaving the US. I don't recall the sim chip charge--20 dollars or so I think. We are charged 65 dollars a month, on top of our US domestic voice service plan, for unlimited 24/7 email and Internet browsing service in 140 countries with partnership agreements with Verizon Wireless, our US service provider.

We have been very pleased with this service in Abuja, Jos and now in the "bush." It seems to work anywhere there is a CelTel tower.

I don't know the cost of the basic voice service plan Tom refers to, but I'm guessing that the monthly total for that plus the data service must be close to $100, currently about 15,000 naira per month, for GPRS (low-to-medium speed) service.

On the other hand, I've tested the MTN service in the past couple of weeks and it has been unusably slow, both at my home and the office, despite having a strong signal.