With 41per cent score that places the country 34^thamong 54 African countries, Nigeria has sunk in internet resilience, according to an email note by Internet Society (IS).

According to IS, the result was arrived using what it called the Internet Resilience Index (IRI).

The group said the internet plays a critical role in society. Nigeria has more than 109 million internet users, and over half of the population has access to the web.

Unfortunately, IS said not all countries have reliable internet infrastructure. Many African nations have under-provisioned networks and lack robust cable infrastructure and redundant interconnection systems. In these countries, the likelihood of Internet outages occurring is much higher than elsewhere, rendering vast swathes of the country unable to use online services to do business, access information, and communicate with loved ones for hours, or even days at a time.

“A resilient internet connection is one that maintains an acceptable level of service in the face of faults and challenges to normal operation. To quantify how resilient the Internet is in African nations, the Internet Society developed the Internet Resilience Index (IRI).

“The IRI offers an overall score and rank of a country’s resilience based on four key pillars: infrastructure, performance, security and market readiness.

“ The IRI gives Nigeria an overall Internet resilience score of 41 per cent placing it in 34^thplace out of 54 nations, indicating that there is still a long way to go to bolster the country’s connectivity.

“Regionally, Nigeria’s Internet resilience ranks joint ninth, along side Togo and Sierra Leone, out of the 16 countries in West Africa,” the group explained in an exclusive interface with The Nation at the weekend. (The Nation)