It is eye-opening to dissect further the source of Nigerian internet growth having reported 43million internet users earlier in the year.

According to the newly released report of mobile web usage world wide by Pingdom; 3.18% of world wide internet traffic comes from mobile devices as Asia and Africa countries lead other developed countries.

Though there is disparity across African Countries but on the average the usage is significant;

• Several African countries have in excess of 20% of web usage coming from mobiles. Nigeria, for example, has just over 25%, Sudan just over 22%. But they don’t match Chad, which has close to 29% mobile web usage. In addition to these, there are several countries with just under 20% mobile web usage, for example Kenya.
• High mobile web usage is not uniform in any way across Africa. There are several countries with mobile web usage far below 10%.
• Several Asian countries, like India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Turkmenistan and Bangladesh, hover around 15% mobile web usage.
• Nokia phones dominate in these countries. In every single one where mobile web usage makes up an unusually high share, Nokia’s Symbian OS completely dominates. In some countries more than 90% of the mobile web traffic comes from Symbian phones. In others, it has a more “modest” market share of 60-80%. After that are usually phones from Sony Ericsson and Samsung. Smartphones sporting Android, iOS or RIM’s Blackberry have tiny market shares in these countries.
• One exception to the above point: Indonesia, where RIM’s Blackberry accounts for more than 31% of the mobile web traffic. But it’s still second to Nokia’s Symbian.

This is not surprising as the cost of wap-enabled mobile phone is cheaper than the cheapest computer in Africa and Asia. And given the low-income in Africa, mobile internet access is a necessity they can’t trade off!

Note: The numbers in this article are for the month of October, 2010, and all come from StatCounter, based on visitor statistics from more than three million websites.