In Nigeria, unsaid rites of passage is finding a network provider that understands your location the most. From MTN to Airtel, 9Mobile to GLO, the choices are never about loyalty it's more about the network that can get us connected without street or tears.
For me, my phone can take up to two SIMs, so I use both MTN and Airtel, nit because I want to buy because I've been betrayed , many times. So yes, if my phone could take up to 3 or 4 Sims I would include GLO and even 9mobile.
Well, I used to be a loyal MTN user because it worked perfectly at our former house. For the longest time it was my main network provider until we moved to a new house. That was the beginning of the network palava, as we say. Suddenly MTN was crawling like a snail, messages would delay, browsing was painful and I just couldn't bear it.
That was when I started wondering what causes all of this why would there be network in one location and none in the other, I still haven't found the reason sha...
So that was when I decided to try Airtel, and good enough it was working perfectly at the new location. Airtel has been really reliable ever since . It works perfectly at home and does not give much trouble except in some days when they're having their technical issues. But generally it's been really good except for the high data cost, well that affects every network now!
Now there's the case of village visits. If you've been to the remote kind of village like ours you'll know network service is a luxury. I always go with a kind heart expecting the least so as not to feel frustrated. Because most times nothing at all works. But somehow I've noticed that MTN works better somehow. It's usually not strong enough for full browsing but it allows me to send quick messages or load a page after a few minutes of patience. So I use MTN more in the village, however there are times when MTN totally vanished and I end up switching to Airtel and sometimes it does come true.
Though there are days when both of them team up and ghost me completely. No signal, no service, nothing. At this point I just keep my phone aside and embrace the offline life, not by choice, but by force!
Having more than one network provider has become a way of life tbh , you just go with the one that shows up for you at the moment.
Images generated using my prompt on Meta AI, Cover image generated using Chatgpt
