Telecom
Social Pressure Bane of Poor QoS- Operators
Telecommunications operators especially Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) are faced with quality of service issues. In line with our promise of offering stakeholders in the industry opportunity to be heard, Mr. Gbenga Adebayo, chairman Association of licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (Alton) explains to subscribers and other stakeholders why quality of service is not getting better.
Persistent Poor Quality of Service
The persistent poor quality of service in spite of sanctions by Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) means that the factors responsible for poor service delivery have not been addressed. Unstable power supply remains the major challenge on improving service delivery. Last year a litre of diesel was sold at N80 but today a litre of diesel is sold between N140 and N170 depending on where you buy and where you are transporting it to. Today, the road networks we have in the country is worst than it was a year ago, operators need to move their things by road. This means that if an operator orders diesel in Abuja, he will have to move it to farest part of the North by road, same in West, if diesel is ordered in Lagos it has to be moved to the farest part of the West by road.
Take for instance, Lagos to Ibadan is a journey of about one hour ten minutes when the road is good, but today one spends about five hour on the same road. Operators are not operating outside the social framework of Nigeria. The fact remains that those issues we are faced with two years ago has gone worst by the day, it is convenient to come out and say ‘we blame operators for every thing,’ because operators have the least voice.
More so, blames, sanctions and discipline of operators can’t address the problem until we begin to isolate the problems one after the other, we won’t make any head way. We are concerned as an association, because today, we see more threat to issues of service of quality than we have seen in the years past. Why? Infrastructures that operators have built are now being attacked by contractors of government. Take a drive to Lekki/Epe expressway you see how many fibre cable that has been excavated that are still on the side of the road. Those are infrastructures that were built two years ago not ten or fifteen years ago. The rebuilding of those infrastructures is to be bowed by operators without recourse to the owners. Dualisation, expansion and rehabilitation of roads is going on across the country, operators have laid optic fibre to improve network backbone across the country, those infrastructure are suffering major attack due to road works by contractors of government, without regard to valid ‘right of way’ for which operators paid several millions of naira to government.
You don’t receive any notice that there will be road works all of a sudden network goes down, visit to site or location of failure, government contractors on site. We have contract from Abuja, we are going to dualise the road. To that end, you start the journey of recoil you don’t know how many points of failure. Because they are government contractors you can’t do anything, government has the power, and operators can only count their losses. It is the consumer that suffers at the end of the day.
We have been on Abuja issue for more than three years; there has not been the right number of service stations and cell sites required to cover the traffic in Abuja, not because operators are not willing to do, but authorities there will not allow operators to install cellular stations.
Telecom is terrestrial. It doesn’t work in the air, it works with physical infrastructure and you must lay the infrastructure for it to work. If government refuses to allow operators lay infrastructure in Abuja I wonder how service quality won’t be poor. It is ‘Ok’ for government to say service quality is very poor in Abuja, and can sanction operators from now till tomorrow; if those fundamentals are not addressed we cannot improve service quality.
About stakeholders forum on vandalization
We are glad that the problem is been discussed, which means that the regulator admits that there is problem in that regard. For the fact that Nigerian Communications Commission called stakeholders meeting means that it has been identified now as a problem. All the time we made representation to the government on the challenges of quality of service has been treated with a wave of the hand. They said “what are you talking about? Who is damaging your infrastructure?” Now that the issue is been discussed, it begins to draw attention of government to some of those things we’ve always spoken about that are treat and impact on quality of service. Until such a time when telecom is classified as national security infrastructure it will not deter people from damaging our infrastructure that is what we are clamouring for.
Let it be known that telecom infrastructure is national security infrastructure and we need to enact a law to support that. It is then that people will be deterred from tapering with the infrastructure. In the Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (Nitel) days, there is miscellaneous offenses decree, where people found liable of damaging Nitel and Power Holding Company infrastructure are sentence to long term imprisonment of up to 21 years. Today, nothing is protecting the service providers.
Is it normal for operators to operate their own power networks? Is also normal to operate under the kind of environment that we operate? Where people go to site and bring down infrastructure on site with impunity, stealing of diesel, generators as well as critical components on cell site. These things that are stolen are sold in the market.
Today, telecom service providers run their main core telecom networks; we run electricity network and diesel supply network and all other kinds of support services to backup the infrastructure. It is difficulty. Until these fundamentals are addressed, we will continue to talk about quality of service.
Another issue is that some states and local government have all kinds of revenue laws that service providers must comply with, failure to comply results in we not accessing our sites, our vehicles cannot move in those States, we can’t maintain existing sites and fibre networks.
Let government do its own, we will do our own. Part of responsibilities of government is to provide enabling environment and to protect operators in the environment. If you go to central Lagos area, when you land a diesel truck, there you have to pay for landing the truck, when you discharge you have to pay for discharging the truck, and when you are taking away the truck from site you have to as well pay for taking away the truck from site. It is called dispatch money; otherwise you don’t come next time. This happens in many other local governments in the country. All these are on the neck of service providers.
Who bears the cost of excavated infrastructure on roads under construction?
The cost of rebuilding the excavated telecom infrastructure is bowed by the operators whose infrastructure is affected. In some cases we have to pay to the same road contractors to allow us to build trenches on the road edges, because in most cases the design of our roads does not make provision for service infrastructure.
As an engineer, I’m worried that by the time we have to rebuild the last mile on our electrical networks all these roads we are building the power people will come and cut it again. This is likely to happen in the next three years.
Operators and sharing of fibre optic cable
Today, the industry is embracing co-sharing, and we are in full support of co-sharing. Alton has championed the issue of co-sharing, and we are glad that our members are embracing it to very large extent. Presently, we have a number of roads where fibre infrastructure is being co-shared. Our concern is not that one operator will not allow the other to co-share infrastructure, but when you co-share and there is damage to that common infrastructure the impact is more. We agree with the idea of co-sharing, we are supporting it, and encouraging our members to embrace it. After the infrastructure is co-shared, how to collectively protect the co-shared infrastructure that those brought together will not have colossal damage is an important issue.
Congestion and inexperienced technical workers
The issue of operators not using the right manpower might not be correct, what might be correct is the loss of competent manpower to other countries. Most competent manpower, trained hands have left this country because of better attraction in other countries. For instance, take a brilliant Nigerian train him on a switch that is made by a major world manufacturer, send him to best training centres across the world, you bring him back, he works here for two or three years. He becomes a specialist in that equipment, which is common equipment across the world, and he find attraction in another country, he leaves without regard to the training you gave to him. That is an issue that the industry is facing today. If you ask the people why they are leaving they complain about the social problem. One could have a good job with fat salary but the problem of social pressure is making us to loss good hands to developed markets.
The problem is high mobility of people who have being trained that is suppose to be specialist now handling core network elements here and we are losing them on account of failure of our social infrastructure.
When people talk about congestion, they are in different ways. The engineering is not something one can easily explain to one who does not have the background. Today, no network operator is working without the right ‘headroom,’ this is the tolerance you have to coup with when there is upsurge in subscriber demand or capacity demand. Operators work with suitable ‘headroom.’ What happens is that, the demand for services sometimes prove wrong of the entire world known theories on projections for ‘headroom’ and others. There are a number of issues when you come to the point of expansion of the network, for example, if you have enough headroom of about 70% the international standard is that you allow for headroom of about 15% but we allow for 70%. In no distance time it is consumed, and you have to begin a process of expansion, so from commissioning it takes a minimum of six months before it is consumed.
As a player and representative of the operators I’m saying that telecom remains the most functional infrastructure in the country today.
With its meteoric rise in data centre development and it accounting for 20% of the global population, Africa still only has 0.6% of global data centre capacity.
This is based on the 2026 Economic Report: Data Centres in Africa, published by Africa Data Centres Association (ADCA), in partnership with Rising Advisory.
The US hosts about 45% of the world’s data centres, while Africa accounts for less than 1% of global capacity.
According to the report, Africa’s active capacity stands at 360MW, with 238MW under construction and 656MW in the pipeline.
By comparison, global active capacity is at 5.5GW, with 1.5GW under construction and a development pipeline of 13.5GW.
Even if all of Africa’s announced projects materialise, says the report, the continent is projected to maintain rather than increase its global share, as hyperscale expansion accelerates elsewhere.
“This is not a catch-up cycle; it is a race to avoid deeper structural marginalisation in global compute,” notes Faith Waithaka, chairperson of ADCA.
“Capacity development in Africa must be approached with a long-term perspective, recognising that infrastructure growth will precede full utilisation as digital ecosystems continue to evolve.
“Sustainability is now a central consideration for the sector. Improving energy-efficiency and integrating renewable energy sources are essential to the viability of data centre operations. Africa is uniquely positioned in this regard, with vast untapped potential across solar, wind, hydro and geothermal resources. Leveraging these assets can support greener data centres, while strengthening energy security and long-term competitiveness.”
Africa’s data centre market is projected by Mordor Intelligence to reach $4.36 billion by 2031, with the South African market considered a “sweet spot” due to its favourable position on the African continent.
South Africa is the largest data centre market on the continent, with55 data centres already built. The country’s geographical position also makes it a strategic hub for regional and international connectivity.
Firms such as Digital Realty-owned Teraco, Vantage Data Centres, Open Access Data Centres and Equinix have expanded their data centre footprint in SA, while hyperscalers Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft Azure have also built local data centre facilities.
The country’s data centre momentum has been highlighted by president Cyril Ramaphosa on several occasions, notably stating that more than R50 billion in investment is expected in the local data centre space over the next three years.
The data centre capacity buildout has also resulted in government calling for accelerated cloud migration, as the state’s digital transformation efforts require greater use of cloud.
Digital rush
The report notes that the global data centre industry is booming as demand for this “digital gold” accelerates.
Valued at $243 billion in 2025, the market is projected to double by 2032, according to the World Economic Forum.
Meanwhile, UN Trade and Development reports that data centre projects accounted for over one-fifth of all greenfield foreign direct investment in 2025.
“This surge reflects the growing need for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, cloud services and digital networks, positioning data centres as indispensable assets driving global growth strategies,” states the report.
“Several converging trends are driving this expansion. Cloud adoption continues to shift workloads off-premises, while AI and big data are reshaping infrastructure needs.”
On the other hand, hyperscale facilities − operated by giants like AWS, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba − have doubled in number roughly every five years, with hyperscale capital expenditure rising nearly 58% year-on-year in 2024.
“Governments across Asia, the Middle East and Africa are offering incentives to attract greenfield projects, recognising data centres as foundations for innovation, skilled employment, and adjacent industries like fintech and AI. Yet Africa faces a stark challenge.
“The continent’s share is expected to expand only in line with global growth, rather than closing the gap. This opportunity has not stayed unnoticed, and investors, expecting high returns, have poured funds into increasing the sector’s capacity by approximately two-thirds.”
Legal steps
According to the report, the heightened activity in the data centre market has resulted in data sovereignty becoming policy reality.
It notes that as of early this year, over 40 African nations have enacted data protection legislation or established data protection authorities, while five additional countries are drafting laws.
Additionally, 15 countries have formalised national AI strategies.
As noted in the ADCA report, the frameworks aim to protect citizens’ rights, while providing legal certainty for investors and digital service providers.
“Governments are increasingly recognising data centres as critical national infrastructure, central to digital sovereignty, financial stability and AI competitiveness.
“As Africa’s digital economies expand, the rules governing ‘where’ and ‘how’ data is stored, processed and transferred are becoming central to economic competitiveness and state capacity.
“Data sovereignty – the principle that data generated within a country should be governed by that country’s laws – has evolved from a legal aspiration into a strategic policy lever, shaping investment patterns, infrastructure deployment and the localisation of digital value chains.”
Even with the frameworks, enforcement capacity often lags legislative ambition, states the report.
“World Bank and GSMA assessments highlight constraints linked to staffing, funding and technical expertise. Yet this enforcement gap also represents a growth opportunity: stronger, more predictable regulation is increasingly seen by investors as a prerequisite for scaling local digital infrastructure. And well-functioning regulation is increasingly functioning as a demand signal.
“Clear localisation and data-protection requirements create predictable demand for compliant, in-country infrastructure, improving bankability for data centre projects and attracting long-term capital.
“Data localisation policies are emerging as part of this broader regulatory maturation. When aligned with market realities, localisation can strengthen oversight, improve accountability and support the development of domestic data centre ecosystems.”
GigaLayer, a prominent player in Africa’s cloud infrastructure and domain services sector, has announced the acquisition of Registeram, a Nigerian domain registration and hosting firm.
GigaLayer
This move marks a significant consolidation in the local tech ecosystem, as GigaLayer continues its aggressive expansion strategy to dominate the digital infrastructure market in Nigeria and across the continent.
Consolidating the Digital Backbone
The acquisition of Registeram, which has been operational since 2008, is the latest in a series of strategic buyouts by GigaLayer.
The company has previously integrated brands such as Trudigits, Hub8, MainOne’s SMEinaBox, and LagosHost, effectively positioning itself as a primary consolidator in a fragmented hosting industry.
According to Ahmad Mukoshy, Founder and CEO of GigaLayer, the deal is less about increasing headcount and more about infrastructure resilience.
“This acquisition reinforces our commitment to building resilient, locally operated cloud and domain infrastructure for African businesses. We are not just acquiring customers; we are strengthening Africa’s digital backbone,” Mukoshy stated.
What this means for Registeram customers
GigaLayer has assured Registeram’s existing clientele of a seamless transition with no immediate service disruptions.
Key highlights of the integration include:
Infrastructure Upgrade: Services will be migrated to GigaLayer’s enterprise-grade platform to improve performance and redundancy.
Security & Support: Users will gain access to enhanced security standards and GigaLayer’s robust support system.
Product Expansion: Existing customers will now have access to broader cloud compute and high-availability hosting solutions.
Focus on Local Cloud Sovereignty
As Nigerian businesses face increasing pressure to comply with local data residency regulations, GigaLayer is doubling down on local cloud sovereignty.
The company currently operates infrastructure across two data centers in Lagos, focusing on bare-metal and cloud compute capabilities designed for enterprise workloads.
By reducing reliance on offshore providers, GigaLayer aims to provide high-performance solutions that are both compliance-ready and tailored for the Nigerian economic climate.
“We believe Africa’s digital future must be built on African infrastructure,” Mukoshy added.
Strategic Outlook
The founders of Registeram are expected to exit to pursue other ventures, while GigaLayer takes full operational control of the assets and client portfolio.
This acquisition signals a maturing market where local players are scaling up to compete with global giants by offering localized support, Naira-based pricing stability, and low-latency infrastructure.
Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave CEO has joined a $22 million funding extension for Nigerian defensetech start-up Terra Industries as Africa’s fast-growing drone and security technology sector begins to attract capital far beyond traditional venture circles.
The round was led by Lux Capital, with participation from Agboola through Resilience17 Capital and returning investors including 8VC and Nova Global.
It follows an $11.75 million raise just weeks earlier, bringing Terra’s total funding to $34 million as the company accelerates expansion into high-risk security markets.
Terra, founded in 2024 by 24-year-old chief engineer Maxwell Maduka and CEO Nathan Nwachuku, builds autonomous drones and surveillance systems designed to protect critical infrastructure such as energy facilities, logistics corridors and industrial sites. The startup says it is already safeguarding assets worth billions of dollars while securing early federal and commercial contracts.
Agboola’s involvement highlights a broader shift in African tech investment patterns. While fintech has long dominated venture flows, escalating infrastructure sabotage and terrorism threats have elevated demand for locally developed security hardware.
“Nigeria’s drone ecosystem is rapidly evolving from hobbyist and mapping use cases toward industrial monitoring, border surveillance and energy protection, areas increasingly seen as foundational to economic stability.
“This is about backing infrastructure security at scale. Africa’s growth depends on resilient systems that protect critical assets,” said Agboola.
Terra CEO Nwachuku is adamant that locally engineered systems are better suited to African operating conditions. “We are building tools designed for the realities on the ground. Security technology should not always be imported when local innovation can respond faster and more effectively,” he stated.
Lux Capital partner Brandon Reeves underlined that the investor appetite, which has drawn fintech heavyweight interest such as Agboola, reflects rising cross-sector confidence in African defense technology as a commercial category. “Security is a prerequisite for economic growth,” he said.
“As Terra ramps production and expands regionally, its funding milestone illustrates a wider transformation. Drone and autonomous security platforms are no longer peripheral experiments but emerging pillars in Africa’s technology landscape, where fintech leaders and venture capital converge around safeguarding the infrastructure powering the continent’s next growth phase,” said Reeves
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