How We Rate Power and Internet Quality by Area

When I lived in Onitsha, someone told me to look for an apartment during the rainy season. I didn’t get it until the rain actually started.

That’s when I found out what the dry-season version of that apartment had been hiding from me the whole time.

Power and internet work the same way. An area can look fine on an afternoon house-hunting trip, and you’d have no way of knowing the light disappears every evening at 7 pm, or that the “great network” the agent mentioned means one bar of signal that vanishes the moment it rains.

If you’re relocating, say transferred from Lagos to Port Harcourt or Warri, you’re deciding about somewhere you’ve maybe seen once, based on information from people whose job is to get the deal done, not to warn you off it.

We built Arandmi so you’re not finding this out the way I did in Onitsha, or paying for it the way we explain in the real cost of moving somewhere blind.

Why We Don’t Rely on Agents or Word of Mouth Alone

Agents aren’t lying to you. But an agent typically earns 10 to 20 percent of a year’s rent when a deal closes, and that shapes what gets mentioned and what doesn’t.

The Commission Incentive Problem

An agent gets paid when the deal closes, not when you’re still happy with the apartment six months later.

That single fact explains most of what does and doesn’t come up during a viewing. Nobody points out the transformer that blows every harmattan season.

Nobody mentions the estate generator only runs from 6 pm to 10 pm and costs extra on top of rent.

It isn’t dishonesty exactly. Their commission is tied to the sale, and your experience after you move in is a separate question they were never really answering.

Word of mouth has a smaller version of the same problem. It’s one person’s experience, filtered through whoever you happen to know in that city, and if you don’t know anyone in your area of choice or state yet, you don’t get word of mouth at all.

The Pure Water Seller Test

When I was house hunting in Port Harcourt, I had a method. I’d walk up to two or three pure water shops nearby, buy a sachet, and while I was there, ask, “How’s the power supply around here?” I’d listen to the answer.

I’d also just feel the water. Cold meant the freezer had been running. Warm told its own story, whatever the seller said.

It’s a genuinely good method. Local, current, coming from someone with no reason to lie to you about a house they’re not trying to rent out.

The problem is it doesn’t scale. You can’t fly in from Lagos to buy pure water on three streets before deciding where to live. Arandmi is that same instinct, written down and available before you ever have to travel.

How Every Review Gets to Your Screen

1. A resident creates an account and submits a review of an area they currently live in, or used to.
2. The review is checked by moderation before it publishes anywhere.
3. Reviews that name specific individuals, contain abuse, or appear to come from someone with a commercial interest in the area are rejected.
4. Once approved, the review is tied permanently to a named account, not posted anonymously.
5. The area’s power and internet scores update the moment a new review clears moderation.

How to Rate Your Own Area

If you rate your area on Arandmi, you’re helping someone make a decision you once had to make blind.

1. Create a free account with your email address.
2. Check your inbox and verify your email.
3. Log in once your account is verified.
4. Select “Rate your area,” then choose your State, your LGA, and finally the specific area, not your house address, just the neighbourhood.
5. Rate power and internet separately, note your provider and average daily hours of light, then write your review. Be specific. Providers, hours, what’s changed in the last year. Nobody knows your street better than you do.

Why We Wait for 25 Reviews

One review can be an outlier. Someone might submit right after an unusually good week, or right after a transformer blew and the street had nothing for three days straight.

Neither tells you what the area is actually like most of the time.

An area needs 25 or more reviews before we call its average reliable. Below that, you’ll see an early signal instead- a real number, but one we’re not fully vouching for yet.

Newer areas take a bit longer to show a confident score. In exchange, “reliable” actually means something when you finally see it.

Understanding NERC’s Power Bands

Nigeria’s power supply runs on an official band system, and it helps to know how it works before you read too much into any single Arandmi score.

How Bands Are Assigned

A band isn’t assigned to your individual meter. It’s assigned to the feeder line serving your whole area, so everyone on that feeder gets grouped no matter how their own house actually performs.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Two houses on the same street, both officially in Band B, can have completely different experiences if one sits closer to the transformer and the other is at the far end of the line, where voltage drops and outages tend to hit first during any fault.

NERC’s band number describes the feeder’s average. It says nothing about which end of it you live on.

That’s the gap between what’s on paper and what a resident actually deals with, and it’s exactly what Arandmi’s reviews exist to fill in.

The internet works on a similar principle, even without a government band system attached to it. The Nigerian Communications Commission has said its capacity issues are concentrated in high-density urban zones specifically, with very low impact on rural areas.

In plain terms, your network quality often comes down to how many people are fighting for the same tower more than which provider’s logo is on your SIM.

A street packed with new estates and offices can slow to a crawl at 7 pm while a quieter street ten minutes away, on the same network, barely notices the evening rush.

What Arandmi Can’t Tell You

Every rating here is a resident’s opinion, not a measured reading from a device. We don’t send engineers out with equipment, and one person’s street isn’t necessarily your street, even two blocks over, even inside the same official band.

Use it to narrow your search, not to replace actually going there. Talk to people. Maybe find a pure water shop of your own(Lol….just joking).

If you’re weighing a move, search your area on Arandmi before you commit to anything.

Frequently Asked Questions