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.
MTN Nigeria has marked 25 years of commercial operations, with Karl Toriola, chief executive officer, saying the company began operating in the country at a time when telecommunications access was severely limited.
Toriola said that a quarter of a century ago, making a phone call was a privilege few Nigerians could afford.
People queued at public telephone booths and centres, travelled long distances to deliver messages, and sometimes waited weeks for letters to arrive, he said, noting that a mobile phone was then beyond the reach of most.
Today, the company connects more than 90 million people across Nigeria, a figure MTN says reflects its role in building the infrastructure behind the country’s shift to a data-driven economy.
MTN entered Nigeria in 2001 following the GSM liberalisation carried out by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), at a time when mobile telephony was still a luxury reserved for a privileged few.
Toriola said the milestone was about more than subscriber numbers.
Businesses have been built, families have stayed connected across distances, students have gained access to knowledge, and creators have found audiences beyond Nigeria’s borders, he said, crediting the wider telecommunications ecosystem for enabling entire new industries to emerge.
The company also pointed to its role beyond direct connectivity.
MTN has helped build a wider value chain of SIM registration agents, tower contractors, retail distributors, fintech partners and digital developers that now supports millions of livelihoods in Nigeria.
Toriola thanked MTN Nigeria’s customers, saying their trust had allowed the company to expand its community investments through the MTN Foundation, which has supported health, education, youth development and economic empowerment programmes.
Looking ahead, the CEO acknowledged that significant connectivity gaps remain, with millions of Nigerians still needing access to reliable, affordable and inclusive digital services.
He said greater digital inclusion would be a central priority for the company’s next chapter, adding that the anniversary marks both a celebration of the past 25 years and a renewed push to expand digital access for the country’s young and growing population.
“We’ve come a long way. And we are only getting started,” Toriola said.
The anniversary comes as MTN Nigeria continues to navigate rising operating costs tied to Nigeria’s unreliable power supply.
Where the national grid is unreliable, the company and its infrastructure partners have had to rely on diesel generators, batteries, solar systems and other backup power solutions, making network operating costs highly sensitive to fluctuations in diesel prices.
Telecommunications subscribers under the umbrella of the National Association of Telecoms Subscribers (NATCOMS), has handed telecommunications operators in the country September deadline to improve network quality or face legal action.
Deolu Ogunbanjo, president, NATCOMS, said that subscribers have endured deteriorating network services despite repeated interventions, warnings, and sanctions by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
As reported by BusinessDay, Ogunbanjo, noted that if the situation fails to improve through regulatory intervention, NATCOMS will seek justice through the courts by the end of the third quarter.
The ultimatum comes as rising data consumption, subscriber migration, and growing demand for mobile services place severe pressure on network infrastructure across parts of the country.
The NCC stated that mobile operators have offered compensation to more than 75 million subscribers for poor network quality following a regulatory directive requiring restitution in locations where performance fell below required standards.
The regulator is conducting an independent review to determine whether all eligible subscribers received proper compensation.
The compensation scheme, provided through automatic airtime credits for verified service failures dating back to November 2025, requires no individual claims from consumers.
For many subscribers, however, airtime credits do little to offset the broader economic and personal toll of unreliable connectivity.
Emeka Douglas, a subscriber, recounted how poor network quality nearly turned a medical emergency into a tragedy when he was unable to transfer funds to a hospital during his wife’s surgery.
Douglas noted that his brother in the United States eventually sent funds directly to the hospital’s account after local banking channels failed.
Janet Okoye, a small business owner, said unreliable connectivity severely affected her business after service disruptions on her Airtel and Globacom lines led clients to cancel orders.
Teniola Adeyemi, a university student, highlighted dropped calls as a major concern, stressing that recent tariff increases ought to reflect in better service quality.
Grace Eze, an Abuja-based media professional, explained that fluctuating network connectivity once delayed a lead news story intended for her editor in Lagos, resulting in an official query over late submission.
Pressure on national networks is driven by both expanding subscriber numbers and rising usage intensity.
Active telephony subscriptions in Nigeria rose from 182.2 million in January 2026 to over 187 million by April, according to NCC data. MTN leads the market with 96.4 million subscriptions, followed by Airtel with 64.7 million and Globacom with 23.2 million.
Telecom
ipNX Collaborates with ICT Stakeholders on the Future of Fibre-to-the-Home in Nigeria @ ATCON Forum
ipNX Nigeria joined other stakeholders across the telecommunications ecosystem as they convened at the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) Critical Conversation Forum on Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) to deliberate on practical solutions to the challenges affecting broadband infrastructure deployment and the future of fibre connectivity in the country.
The forum, themed “Fibre to the Home in Nigeria: Addressing Challenges, Strengthening Standards and Ensuring Sustainable Deployment,” was held at the Radisson Blu Hotel, Lagos, and brought together representatives from government agencies, telecommunications operators, regulators, infrastructure providers, industry associations, and the media to foster dialogue around policies and collaborative actions needed to accelerate Nigeria’s broadband ambition.
Delivering the keynote address virtually, the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Aminu Maida, described Fibre-to-the-Home as a critical enabler of Nigeria’s digital future.
“FTTH is uniquely positioned to meet Nigerians’ next phase of data demand. The quality of our broadband will increasingly shape the competitiveness of our businesses, the growth of our digital industry and the opportunities available to our citizens,” he said.
Dr. Maida also stressed the importance of protecting telecommunications infrastructure, noting that damage to fibre networks carries significant economic consequences.
“We must uphold deployment standards. Nigeria needs fibre that is properly installed, properly documented, and properly protected.”
Speaking during the opening session, ATCON President, Mr. Tony Emoekpere, underscored the strategic importance of FTTH in achieving Nigeria’s broadband penetration targets while calling for greater public awareness around protecting communications infrastructure.
“This forum is critical because Fibre-to-the-Home is the technology that will enable the country to achieve full broadband penetration. We all depend on communication infrastructure, and it must be protected.”
Drawing a comparison with power infrastructure in the country, he added:
“If somebody comes to your neighbourhood to tamper with your transformer or power cables, everybody will come out. The same thing needs to apply for communications infrastructure. When we see people damaging fibre cables, we should raise an alarm.”
The forum also highlighted successful collaborative initiatives at the state level. Speaking on infrastructure management, Director-General of the Oyo State Infrastructure Management and Control Agency (OYSIMCA), Mr. Adebayo Akande, shared how the agency is addressing fibre theft, vandalism, and promoting shared infrastructure among operators.
He explained that encouraging operators to utilise common pole infrastructure along shared routes would reduce unnecessary duplication, minimise infrastructure damage, improve urban aesthetics, and optimise investment across the sector.
Similarly, Managing Director of the Edo State Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA), Mr. Eghosa Urhoghide, advocated stronger collaboration among operators, regulators, government institutions, road maintenance agencies, and host communities.
He emphasised that strict adherence to NCC deployment standards remains essential to ensuring the long-term sustainability and resilience of Nigeria’s telecommunications infrastructure.
Representing ipNX on the panel discussion titled “Policy, Governance and Regulatory Alignment,” Mr. Segun Okuneye, Deputy Director, Strategic Business Initiatives, highlighted the need for stronger collaboration across the telecommunications ecosystem to unlock the full potential of fibre broadband in Nigeria.
According to him, sustainable fibre deployment extends beyond technology and investment to include policy consistency, stakeholder alignment, infrastructure protection, and shared responsibility.
“Achieving universal fibre connectivity requires more than deploying infrastructure, it requires sustained collaboration between operators, regulators, government agencies and host communities.
“When policies are aligned, deployment standards are consistently enforced, and critical infrastructure is protected, we create an environment where investment thrives and more Nigerians can enjoy reliable, high-speed broadband.
“At ipNX, we remain committed to working with all stakeholders to build resilient digital infrastructure that will support Nigeria’s economic growth for generations to come.”
Throughout the discussions, participants agreed that while Nigeria has made considerable progress in broadband expansion, addressing recurring issues such as fibre vandalism, right-of-way challenges, inconsistent deployment practices, infrastructure duplication, and limited public awareness will require stronger partnerships and coordinated industry action.
The forum concluded with a shared commitment among stakeholders to strengthen industry standards, encourage infrastructure sharing, improve policy implementation, and promote greater public appreciation of telecommunications infrastructure as critical national assets deserving of protection.
For ipNX, participation in the ATCON Critical Conversation Forum reinforces our company’s ongoing commitment to supporting industry-wide initiatives that advance broadband penetration, strengthen digital infrastructure, and accelerate Nigeria’s journey towards a more connected and digitally inclusive future.
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