Seventeen months after the Nigerian Communications Commission approved a landmark 50 per cent tariff hike with a solemn promise of better service, millions of Nigerians are still dropping calls, watching data vanish inexplicably, and staring at network busy screens while paying significantly more for the privilege. It is a contradiction that has now forced the hand of regulators, lawmakers, and the operators themselves.
For Mama Adesewa, a petty trader in Berger area of Lagos who runs a tailoring outfit from her phone, every dropped call is a lost customer. For Emeka, a freelance software developer in Lagos, a slow connection during a client presentation is a professional catastrophe. For the mother in Katsina trying to reach her child’s school via a mobile data line, a network outage is not an inconvenience, it is a failure of essential infrastructure.
However, these are not isolated stories. They are the shared national experience of Nigeria’s approximately 182 million active telecom subscribers, who were told in January 2025 that higher prices would deliver better networks. More than a year on, the evidence suggests otherwise.
In January 2025, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), acting pursuant to its powers under Section 108 of the Nigerian Communications Act 2003, approved tariff adjustments capped at a maximum of 50 per cent of prevailing rates lower than the over 100 per cent requested by some network operators. The Commission framed the decision as a balance between consumer protection and industry sustainability, noting the economic pressures inflation, naira depreciation, and soaring diesel costs weighing on operators.
In a chat with Leadership In 2025, chairman, MTN Nigeria Communications Plc Ernest Ndukwe, stressed that for the telcos to survive in Nigeria, there must be an upward review of tarriff amongst other charges .
However, when the 50 per cent increase raised the minimum cost of voice calls from N6.40 to N9.60 per minute, while the maximum allowed price climbed to N50 per minute. SMS charges rose from N4 to N6, and the price of 1GB of data increased from N287.50 to N431.25. In exchange, the regulator extracted a commitment: operators must demonstrably improve service quality.
That commitment, consumer groups and independent analysts have argued was never adequately enforced. The approval was not clearly tied to firm service delivery conditions. There were no binding quality targets that operators had to meet, no clear penalties for failure, and no compensation framework for subscribers affected by poor service.
In January 2026, Nigerian telecom operators logged 238 major network outages with 75 per cent traced to fibre cuts caued by roadworks or vandalism as incidents surged following the holiday season.
According the reports, the first quarter of 2026 witnessed a disturbing escalation in attacks on Nigeria’s telecom infrastructure, with operators reporting 5,934 fibre optic cable cuts throughout the country. Occurring at a rate of 30 to 43 daily, these interruptions severely impaired voice and SMS services, crippled fintech applications, and disrupted enterprise connectivity on a national scale.
The NCC’s executive vice chairman, Dr. Aminu Maida, acknowledged the scale of the structural damage. Between January and August 2025 alone, Nigeria recorded 19,384 fibre cut incidents, 3,241 cases of equipment theft, and over 19,000 cases of denials of access to telecom sites. “Together, these disruptions have caused prolonged outages, revenue losses, increased security costs, and delayed service restoration,” Maida said at a business roundtable in Abuja.
Meanwhile, MTN, the country’s leading operator, recorded 1.62 million customer complaints logged and resolved across call centres, social media platforms, emails, and physical service centres nationwide.
While operators have not been idle, as the tariff windfall has to a significant degree been redirected into infrastructure, as some experts alluded, critics argue the pace and reach of that investment has fallen short of the scale of the problem.
MTN Nigeria more than tripled its capital expenditure to N757.4 billion in 2025, signalling its biggest infrastructure investment in years, as the country’s largest telecom operator raced to meet surging demand for data and broadband services. The figure rose from N217.6 billion in 2024. “We accelerated investment in our network to improve quality of service in line with our commitment to customers and the government,” chief executive officer Karl Toriola stated.
Furthermore, the firm disclosed that it invested N1 trillion in network infrastructure in 2025, more than double its capital expenditure in the previous year, and plans to increase investment further in 2026 to keep pace with growing data demand.
Similarly, Airtel Nigeria stepped up as the company announced plans to double its capital investment, with the new drive covering critical infrastructure upgrades, rural network expansion, advanced data solutions, customer experience enhancements, and community-focused initiatives, including accelerated 5G rollout and the addition of more sites in underserved and rural communities.
Across the industry, capital expenditure rose 159 per cent year-on-year, from N1.12 trillion in 2023 to N2.9 trillion in 2024, with most spending directed at fibre-optic expansion, 5G deployment, and network modernisation.
Yet the disconnect between capital outlay and lived experience has fuelled deep scepticism. Subscribers frequently report the phenomenon of data depletion, where data bundles appear to vanish much faster than actual usage, leading to accusations of unfair billing practices and a general mistrust of service providers. Urban centres suffer from congestion while rural areas remain severely underserved, with the gap widening even as the Telco’s investment figures grow.
With consistent complaints and mounting public frustration , political pressure, the NCC and the federal government interceded and shifted their stance from persuasion to enforcement. In a letter dated January 8, 2026, minister of communications, innovation, and digital economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, wrote directly to the NCC demanding immediate and automatic sanctions against operators for network failures. “The expectation is clear: Nigerians must experience tangible improvements in the quality, reliability, and value of telecommunications services. Infrastructure investment enables capacity; regulatory enforcement and accountability must deliver quality,” Tijani wrote.
The NCC while anchoring its toughened stance on revised Quality of Service Regulations issued in July 2024, expanded performance obligations to cover a wider range of infrastructure players, including colocation providers, while significantly raising penalty thresholds for non-compliance. Following a transition period through 2025, the Commission fixed September 2025 as the deadline for full compliance.
The financial consequences are now materialising. In October 2025, three operators: Globacom, Airtel, and IHS Towers were fined a combined N45 million. More significantly, additional breaches carrying cumulative liabilities of about N12.4 billion are now moving through regulatory processing, with pre-enforcement notices already issued.
In a notable departure from previous policies, the NCC has extended the accountability loop to tower companies. Recognising that mobile network operators are often at the mercy of infrastructure providers who manage their masts, the regulator is now mandating that fines levied against tower companies be reinvested into measurable infrastructure upgrades, through a ring-fenced penalty system designed to channel the estimated N12.4 billion in pending industry fines back into fixing the root causes of service failure.
An act that has put the consumers on the front burner is the introduction of mandatory subscriber compensations, a policy long demanded by consumer rights groups which were earlier resisted by operators. From April 2026, the NCC mandated that telecom operators automatically compensate subscribers for poor network performance, with the policy retroactively covering service failures dating back to November 2025.
Under the framework, operators are required to identify affected users and credit their accounts proactively without requiring subscribers to file complaints in the form of airtime or data bonuses depending on the nature of the disruption.
While the results have been swift and significant. Following the NCC’s directive of March 29, 2026, telecom operators in Nigeria have compensated more than 75 million subscribers for poor network services, in one of the largest consumer redress exercises recorded in Africa’s biggest mobile market. The Commission disclosed this in a communiqué issued after its 109th board meeting held on May 25, 2026. Hence, MTN took the lead with the compensation to their subscribers while Airtel and other followed the directive.
It is worth noting that projections by operators estimated that they plan to invest about N1.86 trillion in 2026, with spending targeted at network expansion, technology upgrades, and broader operational improvements aimed at strengthening service delivery.
Eexperts cautioned that compensation without systemic improvement merely treats symptoms. According to a Teju Abolade, Digital Infasture analyst, with the over N12 billion fines from the NCC, this might raise the cost of delivering poor service, but sustainable improvement hinges on operators proving their recovery capabilities considering the speed in detecting failures, their responsiveness in restoring connections, and their consistency in communicating with subscribers during incidents. All these need to be factored. Because the finiancial penalties alone will not enhance telecom services.
The NCC is finalising Nigeria’s first structured Spectrum Roadmap for 2025 to 2030, alongside revised enforcement regulations due for gazetting in 2026, designed to make penalties predictable, oversight continuous, and compliance unavoidable.
The Commission conducted a comprehensive audit of 965 Base Transceiver Station sites in the Federal Capital Territory during the fourth quarter of 2025. The audit uncovered 5,557 infrastructure infractions ranging from power and cooling failures to security lapses, with regulatory intervention leading to the remediation of 81 per cent of the identified issues by December 31, 2025.
Meanwhile, Nigeria’s telecom sector is, by most financial metrics, thriving. Voice revenue in 2025 posted N1.35 trillion at a 41.9 per cent rise, while Airtel Nigeria recorded N1.08 trillion in profit within the same period. Average monthly data usage per MTN subscriber climbed to 13.2 GB, while Airtel’s home broadband user base reached 4 million.
But for the subscriber watching the football mundial in the US, Canada and Mexico via their mobile or staringat mobile payment keeps timing out, those figures offer cold comfort. What they want is what they were promised when they agreed to pay more for a network that works.
