What you need to know about the Naij-Opera-MTN free internet webpass

Naij in partnership with Opera and MTN Nigeria announced they are offering Nigerians 1 million days of free internet web pass access for a period of one month. This partnership was announced at a media brief yesterday in Lagos.

Richard Monday, VP Africa, Opera software said ‘everyone has a universal right to the internet’ hence the aim of the partnership is to serve people who cannot afford to buy data plans and ultimately offer access to people who have never used the internet via Opera – which is highly compressed thus offering users subsidized mobile data.

Here is how it really works. Each user will get a free day of internet access by visiting webpass.opera.com on mobile using Opera Mini browser on the MTN network and get a 24 hours access to the internet. This access is limited to 40,000 passes daily on a first-come-first-serve basis with a data cap of 10MB daily.

Once you are able to get a day pass to access the internet, you won’t be able to get another pass until after 48 hours (2 days) and users will not be able to download neither will you be able to stream videos or music online so you are just restricted to viewing web pages – and must not go beyond the 10MB data cap.

The question of whether this is really what Nigerians need at this moment will be left for consumers to answer themselves as we consider the fact that data is getting cheaper and lots of people are switching to smart devices on a daily basis. Android or iOS users won’t be able to use this offer and even if they choose to, owing to the fact that they do not have an active data plan, 10MB data won’t be able to do so much and it could get frustrating to know that it is competitive with a limitation to 40,000 users daily and you won’t get another until after two days. Meanwhile Richard claims it is very unlikely for thee targeted users to exhaust the 10MB data in a day.

The claim is that this offer is basically for people who use feature phones to connect to the internet and also provide access for people who have never used the internet before.

I agree this is acceptable and very welcomed – but I do not think that people who really want to use the internet would just want to be restricted to flipping through webpages, even if they can’t stream music or videos, they want to use instant messaging applications which they won’t have access to.

This model offers zero risk internet adoption to users and it is the first of its kind in Africa. The model has been introduced in India, Indonesia and Pakistan.

The stakeholders in this deal expect that this will bring more people to the internet, expand advertising space and create a greater share for digital advertising in the total annual advertising spend in Nigeria. MTN is providing the internet service, Opera is providing the gateway but it is still not clear what Naij stands to gain from paying for the internet access although it claims this is more of a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

I still believe that Naij will have the opportunity of throwing in more ads to users.

At the moment, this offer is only available to MTN users. Naij says it will be willing to expand this to other telecom operators in the future so that more mobile subscribers in Nigeria can enjoy the offer.