Why BB Subscription Is Cheaper Than Other Data Plans in Nigeria

I stumbled on a thread at Nairaland yesterday, where the OP shared the
NCC (Nigeria Communications Commission) response to her query on why
Nigeria network providers can't make other data plans to be as cheap
as BIS (Blackberry Internet Subscription). I'm sure you will agree
with me that the issue of expensive data plans especially for Android
smart phones has been generating a lot of comments online lately.
According to the thread, RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry, utilises
a special compression algorithm to serve users of Blackberry handsets
who have subscribed for BIS. Whenever such a BIS subscriber surfs the
internet and opens a web page, a request is sent via the BB's browser
requesting for the page to be downloaded to the phone. This request is
channelled to RIM's gateway in Canada, which fetches the web page,
compresses it and sends the compressed data back to the BlackBerry
phone as a download.
On an Android smart phone, the request to open a web page by
subscribers is sent to the gateway of the network operator which then
processes the information and sends back the page to the Android phone
as a download (the data is not compressed - thereby requiring more
bandwidth).
The amount of bandwidth uploaded is identical between both Blackberry
and Android phones, the difference lies in the fact that most of what
subscribers do on their phones is to download content which varies on
both. BlackBerry is indirectly subsidising bandwidth by compressing
the content downloaded by subscribers.
In effect, an internet subscriber using an Android smart phone to open
a web page may be downloading 100KB of data, while a subscriber using
a Blackberry opening the very same web page would be downloading 25KB
due to the compression of data by RIM.
Bandwidth in Nigeria is an expensive resource, because most data is
transferred wirelessly. This is the reason why the NCC is promoting
wired infrastructure around the country through such projects as WIN
(Wire Nigeria) as well promoting a Broadband roadmap for the country
which will greatly reduce the cost of bandwidth thereby reducing the
cost of browsing the internet on smart phones.
I hope you now understand why BIS might continue to be cheaper than
other data bundles.