Google has announced it will make free Wi-Fi facilities available in 200 sites in Lagos and other five additional states in Nigeria from now until 2019, aiming to connect at least 10 million people.
Nigeria is joining India, Indonesia, Mexico and Thailand in the program, by providing its citizens with hot spots in public places. So far there have been four stations that have gone live on July 25, such as the Local Airport and the Ikeja City Mall.
In order for Google to be able to provide the service, they joined forces with 21st Century, one of the largest fibre network providers in the country. Together they offer a cloud based platform that will also manage the future hot spots in places like colleges, markets and bus stations.
The company will get revenue from local advertising on the login portal and will share those revenues with its technical partners.
Anjali Joshi, Google’s Vice-President has said that the internet has the potential to transform Africa:
“Across the globe, countries, which have invested in nurturing digital and innovation-based cultures not only enjoy extraordinary wealth (and job creation), but have also transformed the way people live and do business. That positive change can only happen, however, if everyone can access the Internet.”
Google is not the first company that entered Nigeria with the goal of supplying internet access to the public – in 2017, Tizeti, a startup that uses solar power to supply Wi-Fi towers in Nigeria, entered into a partnership with Facebook, in order to deploy affordable Wi-Fi services across the country via a project named Express Wi-Fi.
The difference between the Google and the Facebook offer though is the fact that the Google Station Wi-Fi is completely free for the public.
The announcement came alongside an update on a few products from Google’s “Go” initiative, which launched in 2017. The “Go” initiative aimed to give people with low bandwidth connections and who use low-RAM devices the best possible Google experience.
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