Telecom
Fixed Broadband – The Next Big Thing for Nigeria

By: Rajiv Aggarwal
Nigeria urgently needs rapid rollout of broadband services to address the country’s various socio-economic challenges.

Rajiv Aggarwal, Head of CEWA Market Unit at Nokia
With a population estimated at about 203 million people, 23 percent of the overall population is currently unemployed.
Furthermore, 55 percent of the country’s youth are unemployed, which presents a massive challenge considering that over half the population is under the age of 25.
According to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country’s broadband penetration as at June 2021 stood at is 39.9 per cent with a broadband subscriptions figure of 76.29 million.
Therefore, the country is faced with the tremendous challenge of puttingits largely unemployed and underemployed population to work.
Addressing Nigeria’s socio-economic challenges
The rapid rollout of broadband services will address various socio-economic challenges faced by the country, including the need to grow its economy, job creation, expansion of the tax base, and improving digital literacy and educational standards.
This will also address identity management and security challenges through the effective use of technology, increase financial inclusion and deliver a broad range of services to its people to improve their quality of life and work towards achieving the UN’s 2030Social Development Goals.
The new Broadband Plan is designed to deliver data download speeds across Nigeria of a minimum of 25Mbps in urban areas, and 10Mbps in rural areas, with effective coverage available to at least 90% of the population by 2025 at a price not more than N390 per 1GB of data.
The Broadband Plan will drive increased fibre connectivity in schools, healthcare facilities, government buildings and towers, amongst others.
Notably, a large traffic volume within the middle mile networks is still backhauled using microwave equipment today.
While this type of backhaul was adequate for narrow-band voice communications, it is no longer adequate for the effective delivery of bandwidth-intensive broadband applications driving current demand.
The need to make fibre-optics the de-facto means of backhauling traffic within middle-mile networks, for the effective deployment of broadband networks, cannot be overemphasized.
Last-mile connectivity in Nigeria is also largely mobile with comparatively lower investments made in fixed-line infrastructure within the past two decades.
There is therefore a need for improvement in last-mile connectivity for increased adoption.
More submarine cable access will become available as new players such as the 2Africa Consortium extend broadband cable branches to Nigeria, boosting broadband penetration across the country.
The consortium recently announced the addition of four new branches to the 2Africa cable, which will extend 2Africa’s connectivity to the Seychelles, the Comoros Islandsand Angola; and bring a new landing to South-east Nigeria.
The role of fibre and fixed wireless access
To date, fibre density in Nigeria remains particularly low with approximately 10% of base stations connected to fibre and most of the fibre networks overbuilt on the same routes.
The continued reliance on narrowband microwave links remains a limiting factor in terms of aggregate capacity and stability of mobile networks especially in a challenging electricity supply environment.
Denser metro fibre networks will also provide the essential building blocks for future Fibre-To-The-X networks. In addition, the massive development in the real estate sector of the economy with several ‘’gated communities ‘’ being built in cities like Lagos, Abuja, Kano, PHC, Ibadan are also fuelling broadband adoption in Nigeria.
Fibre access is considered the biggest and fastest growing technology with the largest eco-system of players that includes fixed and converged operators, governments, cities, utilities, enterprises, and infrastructure investors.
Fibre access networks are becoming the unifying infrastructure that underpins the entire telecom industry, connecting everyone to everything.
The COVID pandemic has highlighted the “digital divide” and the importance of broadband connectivity worldwide.
New and more powerful fixed networks are therefore needed to increase speeds and improve the user experience.
While fibre remains a preferred choice, it can be expensive, time consuming, and challenge to serve homes and businesses.
To address the broadband need in underserved rural and suburban markets where the economics of FTTH is too cost-prohibitive, fixed wireless access (FWA) is seen as a good substitute via 4G and 5G to enable high-speed broadband.
With expanding network capacity afforded by 5G and new sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave spectrum, more and more operators see FWA as a complement to their “fibre plus FWA” broadband strategy.
The fixed wireless access (FWA) market continues to expand, with the underlying broadband demand arguably accelerated by the COVID pandemic.
The market growth is supported and fuelled by robust product innovations.
It is therefore important to keep pushing the boundaries of fixed technology and make sure the investments in fixed networks made today will be usable for many years to come to meet the inevitable growth in demand for faster, more responsive, and immersive internet services.
Fibre broadband investment enables a premium customer experience, competitive advantage, the lowest operational costs (OPEX), and the lowest power consumption of any broadband technology, with the additional opportunity of service convergence (residential, enterprise and 5G transport).
As a major global equipment vendor with a leading set of Fixed Access technologies, Nokia partners with fixed, converged, mobile and cable operators to deliver extraordinary Gigabit broadband services and enable them to address the unprecedented demands on their networks today.
Our ability to take our customers beyond the network termination point and deliver gigabit broadband throughout the home is another strength, especially with the increased data consumption associating the pandemic.
Fixed broadband will enable Nigerian Service Providers to provide faster speeds and better coverage to customers while achieving the price points highlighted in the Nigeria Broadband Plan.
The use of passive fibre networks along with a shared infrastructure model will greatly reduce the costs of deployment while maximizing the Capex investment.
Fibre not only ensures the speeds of today, but that the capacity needed tomorrow can be met.
Fixed broadband and fibre not only ensure faster download speeds for end users on fibre, but can also serve as an anchor point for densification of mobile networks as well serving as a connection point for wireless access points and even cell towers in some instances.
All of this translates to greater broadband penetration in Nigeria and increased services and benefits for CSPs and their end customers.
As part of the 2Africa Consortium, Nokia is facilitating increased fibre deployments in Nigeria.
Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), a division of Nokia that has been selected to deploy the new branches, which will increase the number of 2Africa landings to 35 in 26 countries, further improving connectivity into and around Africa including Nigeria.
Nokia also provides GPON solutions to several providers in Nigeria, thereby increasing fixed broadband speeds using FTTH.
One of the examples is that Nokia is providing Spectranet, Nigeria’s largest Internet Service Provider, with its GPON solution and enabling 100+ Mbps ultra-broadband services to end users in Lagos and Abuja as part of an extensive Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) rollout.
This kind of deployments with Nokia’s superior fixed network technologies, in turn, enables Nigerian Service Providers to offer up to 1Gbps speeds to end customers using passive fibre connections.
Rajiv Aggarwal, Head of CEWA Market Unit at Nokia
Telecom
MTN Nigeria Wins Award for Best Use of Data @MarkHack 4.0 Awards Night

MTN Nigeria’s commitment to digital innovation took center stage at MarkHack 4.0, the annual marketing and technology conference held at Landmark Event Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos, on Friday, May 23, 2025, with the theme ‘Experience Ignited: Fueling the Customer’s Journey’.

L-R: Akinbulejo Onabolu, Head, Enterprise Segment, MTN Nigeria; Eneyi Obi, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Rise; Tobi Olanisimi, Marketing Manager, AB InBev; Martha Kayode, Marketing Head, PZ Cussonz; Sulaiman Shaibu, CEO, BFT Consulting Service and Daniel Adeyemi, Managing Editor, Condia Business at the MarkHack 4.0 Conference held at the Landmark Event Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos on Friday, May 23, 2025.
In a celebration of innovation, technology, and storytelling, the company also took home the award for Best Use of Data in a Marketing Campaign at the Nigeria MarTech (MarkHack 4.0) Awards Night. This award recognizes brands that have successfully transformed data into compelling narratives and actionable insights to meaningfully engage their audiences.
Akinbulejo Onabolu, Senior Manager, Segment Management, Enterprise Business at MTN, joined a panel to discuss the power of immersive technologies on consumer behaviour. Drawing from MTN’s launch of its 5G Digital Experience Centre in Abuja last year, Onabolu highlighted the rapid evolution of immersive technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) stating “Our 5G centre is a sandbox for our customers to come and see how technology can shape things. At the launch event, we unveiled a smart city to customers, clients and dignitaries in attendance, with gaming and other tech experiences.”
On the intersection of data, AR and VR, he added: “Co-creating with MTN takes our minds to a platform where different partners, companies and creators can bring their buildings, products and businesses for people to see via augmented reality and connectivity, just swiping through and following through that journey.
“As a part of impacting our customer’s lives, a few years ago, we also played around with the Metaverse and we ended up creating some of our back-office processes with some of our customer journeys on augmented reality and virtual reality such that a customer somewhere can engage with a virtual agent to solve real life problems and integrating that back into our operating systems. As an organization, at a lot of our events, you will find a lot of AR and VR experiences.”
Speaking on how MTN is embedding immersive technology into its day-to-day operations, he explained that the company is prioritizing both internal capability development and external engagement. “85% of our organization has undergone extensive training on AI and that already is a great addition to our daily lives. We’re using it to do things differently, developing user journeys and brainstorming different things. In terms of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, we are working with organizations to develop training programs which we use internally.”
He described the bases for this tech as stable connectivity, high bandwidth, high speed and low latency. “Over the past year, we’ve doubled our 5G capacity across the entire country. Wherever you are, you’ll probably start to pick up 5G. With our FibreX service, we’re going way beyond connectivity to create the systems and platforms to support the ecosystem, AR and VR. In addition to this, we’re also engaging regulatory systems to start to tease this out and build the proper governance.”
The session, moderated by Daniel Adeyemi, Managing Editor at Condia Business, also featured insights from leaders in FMCG, consulting, and global marketing, all underscoring the transformative potential of immersive technologies for Africa’s future.
Telecom
MTN Nigeria Invests ₦900Bn in 2025 to Boost Network Quality in Lagos & Abuja

MTN Nigeria has announced a massive capital expenditure (CAPEX) drive for 2025, nearly doubling its investment to almost 900 billion Naira, as it seeks to significantly enhance network service quality in major cities like Lagos and Abuja and extend improvements to other areas.

Karl Toriola
This financial commitment, up from a combined total of approximately 440 billion Naira spent in 2023 and 2024, was detailed by MTN Nigeria CEO, Dr. Karl Toriola, during a recent interview on Arise TV.
Toriola highlighted that a key focus of the increased CAPEX will be on “putting additional capacity in a city like Lagos, particularly in Abuja, where you have a lot of buildings coming up, you need additional sites because there are coverage issues.”
Beyond these critical urban centres, the investment aims to bolster network resilience and ensure power stability for its infrastructure nationwide. This includes proactively addressing site outages by ensuring timely payment for operational necessities such as diesel for generators, a persistent challenge in the Nigerian operating environment
The CEO outlined the comprehensive nature of the upgrade process, which involves “placing orders formally, opening letters of credit, and then the equipment gets shipped in and installed.” He added that where necessary, MTN will be “acquiring new sites” and “laying fiber to the base station to create better stability.”
While the immediate CAPEX is geared towards improving existing service quality and capacity, this investment aligns with MTN’s broader goals, which include enhancing financial inclusion in underserved rural areas, suggesting a long-term vision for network expansion and service improvement that extends beyond metropolitan areas.
Customers are expected to begin experiencing the positive impact of these investments with a “significant improvement in quality of service” anticipated by the end of the second quarter or early in the third quarter of 2025, according to Toriola.
Telecom
Airtel’s AI Spam Alert Flags 9.6m Spam Attempts

Airtel Nigeria, telecom service provider, has announced that its AI-powered Spam Alert Service issued over 9.6 million spam alerts between March 13 and May 20, 2025.
As part of its ongoing commitment to protecting customers from unwanted and potentially fraudulent communications, Airtel designed the AI Spam Alert service to analyze traffic patterns and detect anomalies.
In the period since launch the AI pinpointed a total of 9,667,008 SMS as potential spam messages in the two months after its launch.
Of these, the system identified 528,080 on-net (Airtel-to-Airtel) and 9,138,928 off-net (from other networks) numbers as suspected spam messages, demonstrating the scale of the threat and Airtel’s advanced processing capability.
Airtel Nigeria is a subsidiary of Airtel Africa.
Commenting on this development, Dinesh Balsingh, CEO, Airtel Nigeria, restated Airtel`s commitment to protecting its customers.
“This milestone demonstrates the strength of our AI-driven infrastructure in combating the growing menace of spam and scam calls. At Airtel Nigeria, we are focused on connecting Nigerians and ensuring their safety and confidence while using our network.
“We understand that trust is the cornerstone of digital communication. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in intelligent systems that not only detect potential threats but also learn and evolve with data. As threats become more sophisticated, so will our solutions. As a company, we remain focused on leading the industry in innovation and customer satisfaction, ensuring that every Nigerian can enjoy a safer and smarter digital experience,” Mr. Balsingh said.
The Spam Alert Service is part of Airtel Nigeria’s broader strategy to integrate artificial intelligence into its core offerings to deliver smarter and safer experiences for its customers across the country.
Recall that the Spam Alert Service was launched on March 13, 2025. A groundbreaking and free solution from Airtel, it notifies users in real-time of suspected spam SMS messages by analyzing over 250 parameters.
The Airtel AI Spam Alert Service is available to all Airtel subscribers on smartphones and feature phones.
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