October 20, 2025
The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, has said that Inadequate capacity across the networks to support heavy usage in high-density urban areas is responsible for the poor quality of telecom service being experienced in Lagos, Abuja and other major cities in Nigeria.
NCC in partnership with broadband intelligence firm, Ookla disclosed this being the results of its research findings on the networks.
Focusing on customers data experience, NCC noted that the high density of active internet users in urban areas contributes to the issue of dropped video calls, buffering on streams, failed mobile payments, and slow downloads.
The telecom regulator stated, “Overall, network capacity for data services across the country appears good. However, capacity issues have been observed in urban areas across all major operators.”
“Capacity restrictions are concentrated in urban zones, the impact on rural service is extremely low, reinforcing that this constraint is a localized issue tied to high-density areas,” it added.
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NCC wants telecom operators to invest more in the sector, noting that the most effective strategy to relieve capacity strain in cities is a multi-faceted approach focusing on two goals, which include “aggressively deploying 5G technology and optimizing the capacity of the existing 4G (LTE) network to improve performance for all users.”
“While the National Proportion shows a minimal overall impact across the country, the issue is intensified in high-density urban areas.
“This localized congestion leads directly to peak-hour performance degradation, confirming that targeted infrastructure investment in these urban zones is most critical to ensure consistent service quality,” it stated.
Meanwhile, findings have showed subscribers’ disappointment over the quality of services they are getting from the telecom operators, especially data service.
While a subscriber narrated how the best she could get from her 5G router was a 1MBPs, which only works better at night, others lamented over poor signal strength and intermittent outages, which deprive them connectivity mostly at crucial times.
Telecom operators have blamed the subscriber experience on perennial cases of fibre cuts and damage to telecom infrastructure across the country.
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The operatos, said fibre cuts have been draining the purse of the telecom operators as they keep spending on repairs while losing revenue within the period of the service outage in affected areas.
NCC has also recently mentioned this point with data, noting that telecom operators have been recording an average of 1,100 fibre cuts per week.
President Bola Tinubu, had in August last year, signed an official gazette designating telecom infrastructure as critical national information infrastructure and making it a criminal offence for anyone to wilfully destroy such infrastructure in the country.
According to the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr Bosun Tijani, the gazette, ‘Designation and Protection of Critical National Information Infrastructure Order, 2024’, is a significant step that would strengthen and protect investments in the ICT sector.
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A similar declaration was made in June 2020 by the immediate past Minister of Communications, Dr. Isa Pantami, an action by former President Muhammadu Buhari, making telecom infrastructure, national critical infrastructure.
As part of measures to address the issue, the Federal Ministry of Works and the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy had in February this year, formed a Joint committee to protect Fiber Optic Cables.
