Every morning before Ewoma Okweni logs in to work from her apartment in Ajah, a suburban neighbourhood in Lagos, she calculates how much internet bandwidth the day will cost her.
An audit officer at PwC Nigeria, Okweni spends between eight and ten hours online daily on days she works from home, moving between cloud-hosted spreadsheets, PowerPoint files, video meetings, and Chrome windows that multiply endlessly across her screen.
Twenty gigabytes of data disappear in three or four days. She buys a weekly ₦5,000 ($3.65) bundle because, for her, the monthly plans no longer make economic sense for the kind of work she does.
“I have like thirty tabs open on Chrome, multiple PowerPoint files open,” she told TechCabal in a telephone conversation. And I work on the cloud. Whatever you do has to be saved on the cloud.”
On weekends, the data drain continues with Netflix, Instagram, and YouTube. Yet despite rising costs and persistent frustrations, Okweni has never seriously considered leaving MTN for one of Nigeria’s new Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs)–telecom providers that offer voice, data, and messaging services by leasing network capacity from established operators.
