The Nigerian Internet market has recently arrived. The NCC has licensed 38 ISP's to sell services and 12 are currently active. In mid-1998 Nigeria only had a few dialup email providers and a couple of full ISP's operating on very low bandwidth links. Few were able to afford the $130,000 a year for an international 9.6kbps leased line.

Excluding South Africa, the total international outgoing Internet bandwidth installed in Africa is about 60 Mbps. As a result a growing number of African Internet sites are hosted on servers that are in Europe or the United States.

CURRENT EXCHANGE RATE IS $1 = 108 NGN 12/18/00

At 9.6 Kbits, full Internet access costs N150,000, email connection is N24,000. High costs are blamed on the tariff for NITEL's circuit.

Expecting NITEL to come up with new tariff on its Internet gateway, which should be cheaper for subscribers.

At 64Kbits another private company put the cost of full Internet access at N240,000, or N120,000 for 9.6Kbits circuit.

Microcom is introducing 128Kbit access and planning to offer competitive tariffs

Cities with Internet POP's: 5

Dialup Internet Subscribers: 10,000

Internet Hosts: 77

Internet domains: 641

Dialup Internet Cost: $40 for 20hrs./month

Internet Accounts: 5,000

International Internet Link: >1 Mbps*

International Bandwidth: 1152 Kbps

ISDN: None

Internet Access Providers: 12

Across Africa there is growing interest in kiosks, cybercafe's and other forms of public Internet access. Plans are in place to add PC's to community phone-shops, schools, police stations and clinics which can share the cost of equipment and access amongst a larger number of users.

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Workers installing fiber optics cabling must be constantly aware of the surrounding dangerous environment.

Nigerian society is still thick with tribal culture and traditions. Here two members of a local tribe worship at a shrine.

A large percentage of Nigerians are Muslim and can be seen praying to Mecca. Their Muslim beliefs will ultimately have impact on filtering web content in Nigeria.