Nigeria Has 4,000 .ng Domains - Report

Nigeria sat on the periphery of the world’s Internet space in 2007 recording only 4,000 domain names according to World Internet Statistics, a report prepared by Miniwatts marketing Group.

Domain name is a name given to a collection of network devices that belong to an area which is managed according to some common properties of the members or within a common administrative boundary for example, .ng.

But as Nigeria sat casually, South Africa was Africa’s largest and probably still amongst the top 20 country code top-level domains.

Worldwide however, there are 249 country code top-level domains and 58 million domain names in the country code top-level category compared to 95 million generic top-level domain names.

About 12.2 million new domain names were registered during first quarter of last year representing an increase of 5% year on year, while South Africa’s .za emerged as the largest in Africa and among the top 20 country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) in the world.

There were about 51 million internet users in Africa as at March this year representing 3.6% of Africa’s population of 955,206,348.

According to World Internet Statistics report released recently, of the world’s Internet usage of 1.4 billion, Africa accounts for 5.3 percentage of Internet penetration.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek also gathered that Africa‘s internet usage growth increased by 1030.2 percent between year 2000 and 2008.

However, Nigerian Automous System Number (ASN) that recorded 16 domain names in 2007 has dropped to three this year.

Industry experts have predicted that the number of broadband subscribers in Africa will expand more than four-fold over the next five years, from about 3m in 2007 to 13m by 2012.

The African broadband marketplace according to AfricaNext research has long been littered with pessimism - low PC penetration as well as high cost of International bandwidth. In their report, AfricaNext Research argues that this is all about to change as a result the deployment of new submarine cables to stimulate improvements in radio spectral efficiency.

"There is a confluence of catalysts that suggest that African broadband growth is on the verge of truly taking off. We believe this is the most significant opportunity for investment returns in the African TMT sector since the mobile voice boom," said Guy Zibi, principal and report author, AfricaNext Research.