Nigerians students in senior secondary schools and undergraduates in various Nigeria’s higher institutions are spending an estimated N159 billion cumulatively on mobile phone data monthly, LEADERSHIP checks have shown.
According to available data, there are an average of 13. 9 million academics in the country’s public and private secondary schools, and two million university academics spread across the country’s tertiary institutions.
Many of the academics LEADERSHIP spoke to admit that they now spend an average of 10,000 Naira per month on knowledge due to the increased knowledge burnout that the country’s top four telecommunications companies are experiencing lately.
This amounts to 15.9 million students who spent about N159 billion, translating to an average of N10,000 per student monthly on mobile data, LEADERSHIP findings revealed.
Additional research has revealed that the training and virtual learning now being delivered in some high schools, universities, polytechnics, and other higher institutions have a higher knowledge intake of students after Covid-19.
This is in addition to the content that the same academics feed on social networks, including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter, among others.
Some, especially, final year students spend huge amounts of data on research for their graduation projects.
To this end, the students would be spending N1.908 trillion over a period of twelve months in a year, thereby, allowing the major mobile telecommunications networks, especially, MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9mobile, accrue a lot of profit from data consumption in the country.
Hence, Nigerian undergraduates have lamented the huge amount of funds they spend on data monthly, saying they are not getting value for money and are suspecting foul play by mobile telecommunications networks.
Therefore, they have called on the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to investigate reasons behind the recent data depletion.
Data exhaustion, which occurs when a subscriber depletes their knowledge plan before the expiration date, or when more volume is used than is used to access online content that is greater than what the subscriber thinks it is, or what it is, has been a challenge. It’s a major challenge in the telecommunications industry, and Nigerians have expressed frustration lately.
For example, a professor at Lagos State University (LASU), Prosconsistent with Adegun, said he spends between N8,000 and N10,000 per month on data.
“That’s more than I spend per month on food. There is no doubt that knowledge is life, but the rate at which it is being depleted is alarmingly low. I will be satisfied if the NCC can do something about it,” Adegun said.
Oladipupo Ramadan, a 200-level student at LASU, said, “A few years ago, I couldn’t use up 2GB in a month, but right now, 6GB is rarely enough for me. I keep wondering what’s going on that I know of. If knowledge were something I could do without, I would gladly have ignored it, because it consumes my money. Unfortunately, it’s a necessity for all of us.
Femi Adewoye, a 300-level student at Obafemi Awolowo University (OUA), Ile-Ife, Osun State, who relies on knowledge for research, classes, and to keep in touch with friends, expressed frustration at the speed at which knowledge is acquired. being consumed.
He said, “I run out of knowledge before the end of the month, and that affects my ability to study and keep up with my classes. The amount of money I spend on knowledge is outrageous. Network providers want to improve their service delivery.
Reacting to accusations of knowledge exhaustion, telecommunications industry regulator NCC said knowledge exhaustion is one of the most common court cases won among telecom consumers in the country. He noted that most of the court cases were the result of recent migration. from consumers to 4G and 5G/LTE technologies.
“It is, therefore, important that we completely appreciate and understand the issues surrounding data depletion, its usage, and consumption in the era of 4G technology before we fully commence 5G usage. As much as the commission has an obligation to the telecom consumer, it also has an obligation to the industry, a symbiotic relationship in which one party cannot survive without the other.
“The consumers are the basis for the operators’ business; if their interests are ignored, the operators’ investments would collapse, and there would be no industry for the Commission to regulate,” it stated.
Explaining in more detail, the Director of Technical Standards and Network Integrity, NCC, Eng. Edoyemi Ogoh said a number of variables, whether technical or non-technical, may be at the root of the knowledge exhaustion faced by telecom subscribers.
Ogoh, who gave this explanation at the 91st Telecom Consumer Parliament (TCP) organized through NCC, said that technically, even if a user has just opened a file to read text, most browsers play videos by default.
He talked about other problems of silent knowledge leakage, such as automatic app updates and uploading symbols and videos from smartphones to the cloud.
Other technical aspects, he explained, come with a faster internet connection thanks to the transfer to 4G, which automatically plays videos in higher quality formats and more bandwidth.
“The non-technical points that contribute to knowledge exhaustion are the expansion of social media; online advertisements and default audio-visual activations in Internet browsers and applications; the use of poor quality and fictitious subscriber devices; the expiration of timeouts for the use of the knowledge pack before it runs out; and the low purchasing power of subscribers, leading to the acquisition of small-sized plans with short periods of use and a higher frequency of knowledge exhaustion complaints,” he said.
Meanwhile, NCC’s CEO and executive vice chairman, Dr Aminu Maida, has declared that starting from January this year, it will closely monitor the quality of services provided by the nation’s four major telecom providers.
Maida is confident that the NCC will join the operators and analyze the challenges.
“In my relationship with the CEOs of telcos, I had to let them know that we want to make sure that everyone, regardless of location, gets their money’s worth. There are demanding situations everywhere, whether it’s diesel or safety, but because due to the criticality of the telecommunications infrastructure, we must not give up,” he said.
On the customer side, Maida said the regulator will continue to educate customers to perceive behavior that leads to greater knowledge use, “because as we upgrade our phones, we buy phones with higher tolerance for knowledge that produce higher quality photos. ” quality and post them on our social media platforms, but we don’t realize that those behaviors consume knowledge faster.
“We’re also going to focus on the disorders that have gotten worse. We’re going to step in, as a regulator, to see what are the usual disruptions that customers complain about, what regulators are doing about it, so that we can really hold everyone in the price chain accountable. We’ll also look at how we can achieve overall protection and integrity from the customer’s perspective.
© 2023 Leadership Media Group – All Rights Reserved.