The electrical power grid in Nigeria is limited in terms of reach and utilization, and this leaves a large section of the population without access to power supply. This paper therefore reviews literature on the current state of the conventional electrical power grid in Nigeria. The generation, transmission and distribution sectors of the grid are briefly reviewed before examining the extent, capacity and power generation technologies used by some currently deployed mini-grid systems. It is observed that a majority of deployed mini-grid systems depend on solar photovoltaic renewable energy sources and such systems are mostly isolated from the conventional grid. Therefore, to make a case for improved access to electrical power supply in the country, statistical and demographic analysis has been carried out to reveal the size of the electrical energy market available to mini-grids and the need to integrate current and future mini-grids to the conventional grid. It is noted that with substantial but targeted investments, a number of existing smart grid technologies can be employed to integrate mini-grids to the conventional grid thereby providing affordable access to electricity for communities that are hitherto unserved or underserved by the conventional grid. Some of the available smart grid technologies that have been identified to be suitable for integration purposes include advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), flexible alternating current transmission system (FACTS) and high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines. A top-level schematic of how and where such technologies can be deployed is provided.
Even though the proliferation of handheld mobile communication devices has deepened Internet and broadband penetration in Nigeria, users of such services may not have detailed quantitative performance comparison between the services provided by different network operators. The study here reported is therefore an attempt to bridge the information gap. A measurement testbed based on the Raspberry Pi platform was developed to autonomously measure the mobile broadband performance of third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) broadband networks of the four major mobile network operators in the country. Under static access conditions, the system was set up to measure the upload throughput, download throughput and latency from a user-centric perspective. The measurements were taken by simultaneously sampling the networks of four mobile broadband service providers (9Mobile, Airtel, Globacom and MTN) over a period of three weeks in the city of Uyo, Nigeria. The results obtained revealed that Airtel achieved the highest peak download rate for 3G throughput, and this was only 1.41 Mbps higher than the least performing MNO. Also, it was found that MTN’s download rate peaked at 35.06 Mbps, and this was over 300% of the rate achieved by the fourth rated network in terms of the 4G download throughput metric. The measurement results also revealed that peak usage periods, defined as the hours between 7pm and 11pm, witnessed higher variability in throughput rates than other periods.
Mobile broadband (MBB) penetration has deepened globally over the last twenty years. This is largely due to the adoption of smart devices, improved mobile communications network coverage, and the perpetual drive to develop ever faster mobile and wireless communication technologies. However, information on the quality of service (QoS) delivered by MBB operators to the end users remains an issue of concern. This has driven independent researchers and mobile communication industry regulators to develop methodologies for independent and unbiased evaluation of the QoS offered by MBB networks. This paper provides a detailed review of MBB adoption and penetration across several regions of the world. It also includes the existing methodologies for evaluating the performance of MBB systems as experienced by the end user. Specifically, methodologies such as the drive and walk tests, crowd-sourced mobile device-based methods and the software applications they employ, and the dedicated measurement testbeds are reviewed. Based on this, the challenges of adopting each of the methods are discussed in order to make a case for the development of more robust, partially autonomous and scalable MBB measurement platforms for the future.
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