There’s something we don’t really talk about enough.
Nigeria is connected to some of the most powerful undersea cables ever built:
MainOne, WACS, ACE, Glo-1.
Billions of dollars of infrastructure sitting right off our coastline.
Yet most of my mutuals and I are still buying 1GB for ₦1,000, and it’s finishing in 2 hours.
Something is just so deeply wrong, and most people don’t even know where to point the finger.
It’s very easy to assume the problem is the cables, like maybe there isn’t enough international bandwidth coming in.
That’s never been the problem.
The problem starts the moment the signal leaves the water and tries to travel inland. That’s where everything collapses.
A lot of what’s carrying your data across Nigeria isn’t even fiber buried underground.
It’s microwave. Tower to tower. Like a radio signal bouncing across the country.
Cheaper to deploy? Yes. But slower, congested, and breaks down in bad weather.
That’s why your internet gets worse every time it rains. Not network maintenance, so stop blaming these guys.
Here’s something most people don’t know.
MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria don’t own most of the towers your data travels through.
IHS Towers and American Tower Corporation own them. The telcos pay rent every month just to put their equipment up there.
So part of every ₦1,000 you spend on data isn’t staying in Nigeria. It’s leaving.
Then there’s the spectrum conversation.
The 5G spectrum auction in 2022. MTN Nigeria and Airtel Nigeria paid $273 million each for a slot.
And the moment that payment cleared, the clock started ticking on how fast they’d earn it back.
I’m not justifying anything though. Just saying that cost didn’t disappear. It got passed down.
Globacom is the most confusing part of this whole thing.
They own Glo-1, their own submarine cable, built their own pipe into the country.
On paper, that should make them the fastest and cheapest by a wide margin. In practice, they’re neither.
At some point, the infrastructure argument runs out and it just becomes a management problem.
9mobile is a different kind of sad.
The network has changed hands multiple times, been on the edge of collapse for years, and has seen very little serious capital injection.
People joke about 9mobile signal, but that network is genuinely just trying to survive at this point. You guys don’t know.
The part that should actually make people angry.
Nigerian Communications Commission has Quality of Service regulations. Rules telcos are legally required to meet on speeds, call drops, and availability.
They breach them regularly, and the fines are small enough that breaching is cheaper than fixing anything.
That’s not an oversight. That’s a policy design failure dressed up as regulation.
MTN Nigeria and other Nigerian telcos posted massive profits last year.
Nothing wrong with profit. But almost none of it went back into laying new fiber or reaching underserved communities.
220 million people, some of the worst internet quality on the continent. The shareholders are doing just fine, though.
This isn’t a rant actually, Ranting without direction is just noise.
What actually moves the works:
1) Fines painful enough to force real behaviour change,
2) Mandatory fibre rollout timelines,
3) Real competition instead of four companies quietly agreeing to be equally terrible,
5) And 5G that actually reaches beyond Lagos Island.
The cables are there!
The towers are there!
The spectrum is allocated!
Everything needed to give Nigerians fast, affordable internet already exists in some form.
What’s missing isn’t infrastructure.
It’s accountability, and until that changes, this conversation will repeat every single year.
₦1,000 for 1GB. Still loading.
May God help us all.
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