Nouakchott's mobile internet sped from Africa's slowest to top 30

Claim types Fact · Estimate

Speedtest® by Ookla® Global Fixed and Mobile Network Performance Maps, mobile quarterly tile files (Apache Parquet, s3://ookla-open-data; documentation github.com/teamookla/ookla-open-data). Platform-reported, crowdsourced Speedtest app results with GPS-quality location only. Read from the progrss vault (table city_ookla), which loads Ookla's own quarterly files. Checked: the four 2019 and the four latest quarterly files (2025 Q4, 2026 Q1–Q3) are listed in Ookla's public bucket s3://ookla-open-data, and the vault's file keys match them; two city-quarters were recomputed straight from Ookla's parquet files and match the vault exactly (Nouakchott mobile 2026 Q3: 458 tiles, 3,466 tests, 122.78 Mbps; Caracas fixed 2019 Q1: 940 tiles, 42,348 tests, 4.25 Mbps). Ookla defines avg_d_kbps as the average download speed of all tests in the tile; progrss weights tiles by their tests, so each figure is the mean of all tests within 25 km. Method (progrss calculation, same for all four plates in this set): a city is every zoom-16 tile (about 610 m) whose centre lies within 25 km of the city point; each period value is the tests-weighted mean of avg_d_kbps over all tiles and all four quarters of the period ('2019' = Q1–Q4 2019; 'latest four quarters' = Q4 2025–Q3 2026). These are means of tests, not the medians Ookla publishes in its Speedtest Global Index, so they will not match that index. Cities: 102 African cities (sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritania, Sudan, Djibouti and North Africa) in the progrss city registry with at least 100 tests in every one of the eight quarters; ranks and the median multiplier (×3.24) are over these 102. Cities with too few tests are left out; some of them (Zinder and Maradi, Niger, under 50 tests in 2019) tested slower than Nouakchott in 2019. Nouakchott quarterly means, Mbps: 2019 Q1–Q4 2.3, 4.2, 3.3, 3.4; Q4 2025 67.1; Q1 2026 48.1; Q2 96.2; Q3 122.8. Its first big step came in Q4 2020 (3.9 → 21.7). Tests: 1,215 in 2019 (228–379 a quarter), 7,177 in the last four quarters, of which 3,466 in Q3 2026 alone, so the tests-weighted latest value (97.3) leans on that quarter; a simple average of the four quarters gives 83.5 Mbps and rank 27. Either way it is in the top 30. Multipliers: Nouakchott ×29.9 is the largest of the 102, ahead of Constantine (×26.3), Oran (×24.0) and Algiers (×19.7). Chart values, Mbps, 2019 → latest: Algiers 9.30 → 182.91; Port Louis 23.09 → 182.17; Casablanca 29.87 → 157.27; Johannesburg 37.24 → 136.26; Nouakchott 3.26 → 97.27; Tunis 25.07 → 83.88; Cotonou 10.97 → 81.66; Abidjan 23.69 → 76.10; Nairobi 17.26 → 71.65; Lagos 18.24 → 65.11; Dakar 24.90 → 64.65; Cairo 16.06 → 51.33; Accra 12.48 → 37.04; Bamako 43.94 → 35.03. Algiers is the fastest of the 102. Ranks now: Nouakchott 21, Tunis 27, Cotonou 30, Abidjan 33, Lagos 39, Dakar 40, Bamako 85. Attribution: Speedtest® by Ookla® Global Fixed and Mobile Network Performance Maps, accessed from https://registry.opendata.aws/speedtest-global-performance. Based on progrss analysis of Speedtest® by Ookla® Global Fixed and Mobile Network Performance Maps for Q1 2019–Q3 2026. Ookla trademarks used under license and reprinted with permission. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, non-commercial only: allowed on plates, never in a paid pack, licence or data product.