The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has attributed the poor quality of telecom service being experienced in Lagos, Abuja and other major cities in Nigeria to inadequate capacity across the networks to support heavy usage in high-density urban areas.
The Commission gave the explanation in a document highlighting the results of its research findings on the networks in partnership with broadband intelligence firm, Ookla.
With a specific focus on 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.
“Overall, network capacity for data services across the country appears good. However, capacity issues have been observed in urban areas across all major operators,” the telecom regulator stated.
“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,” the Commission added.
Need for more investments
While calling for more targeted investments by the telecom operators, NCC said 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.
Subscriber experience
A recent Nairametrics report highlighted subscribers’ frustration over the quality of services they are getting from the telecom operators, especially data service.
- In one instance, a subscriber narrated how the best she could get from her 5G router was a 1MBPs, which only works better at night.
- Others have also lamented over poor signal strength and intermittent outages, which deprive them connectivity mostly at crucial times.
- However, telecom operators have also blamed the subscriber experience on perennial cases of fibre cuts and damage to telecom infrastructure across the country.
According to them, 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.
Meanwhile, the NCC also recently buttressed this point with data, noting that telecom operators have been recording an average of 1,100 fibre cuts every week.
What you should know
In August last year, President Bola Tinubu 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.
- However, that was not the first time such a declaration would be made. In June 2020, the immediate past Minister of Communications, Dr. Isa Pantami announced a similar action by former President Muhammadu Buhari.
- Also, as part of measures to address the issue, the Federal Ministry of Works (FMoW) and the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy (FMoCIDE) in February this year, formed a Joint Standing Committee on the Protection of Fiber Optic Cables.
