Beneath the shade of a cocoa tree outdoors the hamlet of Atan, close to Ibadan, Nigeria, Bolaji Adeniyi holds courtroom in a tie-dyed T-shirt. “In Nigeria we see farms as father’s work,” he says. Adeniyi’s father taught him to farm with a hoe and a machete, which he calls a cutlass. As of late, he says, farming in Nigeria can look fairly completely different, relying on whether or not the farmer has entry to the Web or not.
Not far-off, farmers are utilizing drones to map their plots and calculate their fertilizer inputs. Elsewhere, farmers can swipe by safety digicam footage of their fields on their cellphones. That saves them from having to patrol the farm’s perimeter and probably harmful confrontations with thieves. To have the ability to do these issues, Adeniyi notes, the farmers want broadband entry, not less than among the time. “Dependable broadband in Atan would appeal to worldwide cocoa sellers and allow entry to agricultural extension brokers, which might assist farmers,” he says.
Adeniyi has a level in sociology and along with rising cocoa timber, works as a criminologist and statistician. When he’s in Ibadan, a metropolis of 4 million that’s southeast of Atan, he makes use of a laptop computer and has adequate Web. However at his farm in Atan, he carries a candy-bar cell phone and should trek to at least one of some spots across the settlement if he needs higher odds of getting a sign. “At occasions,” Adeniyi says, “it’s like wind bringing the sign.”
On paper, Nigeria has loads of broadband capability. Eight undersea cables result in 380 terabits of capability to Nigeria’s coast. The primary undersea cable to reach, SAT-3/WASC, made land in 2001; the newest is 2Africa, which landed in 2024. They’re among the many 75 cables that now join coastal Africa to the remainder of the world. Nigeria’s huge telecom operators proceed to construct long-distance, high-capacity fiber-optic networks from the cables to the vital industrial nodes within the cities. However distribution to the city peripheries and to rural locations akin to Atan remains to be incomplete.
Incomplete is an understatement: Lower than half of the nation’s 237 million individuals have common entry to broadband, with that entry largely taking place by cellular gadgets moderately than extra steady fastened connections. Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Financial system has set a objective to virtually double the size of the nation’s fiber-optic spine and for broadband to succeed in 70 % of the inhabitants by the top of this yr. However the ministry additionally claimed in 2024 that it might join Nigeria’s 774 native governments to the broadband spine; as of February 2025, it had reached solely 51. The broadband buildout has been critically hampered by Nigeria’s unreliable energy grid. Past the mere inconvenience of frequent outages, the poor high quality of electrical energy drives up prices for operators and clients alike.
Throughout a go to to Nigeria earlier this yr, I talked to dozens of individuals about broadband’s impression on their lives. For greater than twenty years, the nation has possessed an unimaginable portal to the world, and so I had hoped to listen to tales of transformation. In some instances, I did. However that have was removed from uniform, with a lot work left to do.
The place Nigeria’s broadband has arrived
Broadband is enabling every kind of modifications in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. All eight undersea cables make landfall in Lagos, the cultural, industrial, and one-time federal capital of Nigeria, and one of many cables additionally lands close to Port Harcourt to the southeast. The nation’s fiber-optic backbones—which in early 2025 consisted of about 50,000 to 60,000 kilometers of fiber-optic cable—join the undersea hyperlinks to the cities.
From 2008 to 2025, Nigeria has skilled extraordinary development in each the variety of undersea high-speed cables touchdown on its shores and the buildout of broadband networks, particularly in its cities. Nonetheless, fixed-line broadband is unaffordable for many Nigerians, and about half of the inhabitants has no entry. Africa Bandwidth Maps
“Just about all over the place in Nigeria is roofed with long-haul cables,” says Abdullateef Aliyu, common supervisor for initiatives at Phase3 Telecom, which is answerable for maybe 10,000 km of these cables. Most Nigerian cities have not less than one fiber-optic spine, and the most important have greater than half a dozen.
The result’s that probably the most densely populated areas take pleasure in competing Web service suppliers providing fiber optics or satellite tv for pc to the house. Connecting the opposite half of Nigerians, the agricultural majority, will turn into worthwhile sometime, says Stanley Jegede, government chairman of Phase3 Telecom, nevertheless it had higher be “affected person cash.”
Unsurprisingly, the purchasers that obtained broadband first have been these with impatient cash, people who might provide the very best return to the telecom companies: the oil corporations that dominate Nigerian exports, the banks which have since boomed, the Nollywood studios that compete with Bollywood and Hollywood.
The impatient cash confirmed up first in flash Victoria Island in Lagos. If you wish to serve worldwide clients or do high-speed inventory buying and selling, you want a dependable hyperlink to the surface world, and in Nigeria which means Victoria Island.
Right here, the fiber-optic cables rise like thick vines in grey rooms on the bottom flooring or within the basements of the workplace towers that home the banks powering Nigerian finance. Between the towers, buying plazas host international fast-food franchises and cafés.
From their perch close to the submarine community, the banks realized that cellular broadband would enable them to succeed in exponentially extra clients, particularly as soon as these clients might benefit from Nigeria’s instant-payment system, launched by the central financial institution in 2011. Utilizing cellular funds, financial institution apps, and different monetary apps, Nigerians can conduct handy cellphone transactions for something from avenue meals to airplane tickets. The central financial institution’s platform was so successful that till lately, it dealt with extra money than its U.S. equivalents.
Simply as vital as comfort is belief. Nigerians belief one another so little {that a} college guesthouse I stayed in had its identify printed on the wall-mounted air conditioner items to discourage theft. However Nigerians belief cellular funds. Uber drivers suppose nothing of sharing their checking account numbers with passengers, in order that the passengers pays their fares by way of instantaneous fee. A Nigerian engineer defined to me that many individuals choose that to disclosing their bank-card data on the Uber platform.
Broadband has additionally introduced change to Nollywood, Nigeria’s huge movie trade, second solely to India’s Bollywood by way of worldwide movie output. On the one hand, broadband reworked Nollywood’s distribution mannequin from simply pirated DVDs to paywalled streaming platforms. Alternatively, streaming platforms made it simpler for Nigerians to entry international video content material, reducing into native producers’ market share. The platforms additionally empowered performers and different content material producers to bypass the standard Nollywood gatekeepers. As a substitute, content material creators can publish straight to YouTube, which can pay them in the event that they obtain sufficient views.
Emmanuella Njoku, a pc science main on the College of the Individuals, a web based faculty, is involved in a graphics or product-design job when she graduates. However a broadband-enabled facet hustle is beginning to appear to be a viable various, she informed me in January. She edits Japanese anime recaps and publishes them to her YouTube channel. “I’ve 49,000 followers proper now, however I want 100,000 followers and 10 million views within the final 90 days to monetize,” Njoku stated.
A buddy of hers had lately crossed the 100,000-follower threshold with YouTube movies centered on visits to high-end eating places round Lagos. The buddy anticipated eating places and different corporations to start out paying her for visits, along with accumulating her tiny reduce of YouTube’s advert income.
Each girls stated they’d choose jobs that enable them to telecommute, a extra real looking prospect in Nigeria in the previous few years because of the provision of broadband. Extra corporations are open to distant work and hybrid work, says telecom analyst Fola Odufuwa. That’s very true in Lagos, the place gas shortages and world-class visitors jams encourage individuals to reduce the variety of days they commute.
For lecturers, broadband could make it simpler to collaborate on analysis. In 2004, IEEE Spectrum reported on a Federal College of Expertise researcher in Owerri carrying handwritten messages to a contact, who had a pc with an Web connection and would kind up the messages and ship them as emails. At present researchers on the Federal College of Expertise campus in Minna collaborate nearly with colleagues in Europe on an Web of Issues demonstration challenge. Whereas some occasions happen in individual, the collaborators additionally change emails, meet by videoconference, and work on joint publications by way of the Web.
Why broadband rollout in Nigeria has been so gradual
The undersea cables and fiber-optic backbones have additionally been a boon for Nigeria’s telecom trade, which now accounts for 14 % of GDP, third solely to agriculture (23 %) and worldwide commerce (15 %).
Alcatel (now a part of Nokia) linked SAT-3 to Nigeria’s essential switching station in December 2001, simply a few years into the primary steady democratic authorities since independence in 1960. The state-run phone monopoly, Nigerian Telecommunications (Nitel), was primarily answerable for the rollout of SAT-3 throughout the nation. Lower than 1 % of the 130 million Nigerians had cellphone traces in 2002, so the federal government established a second provider, Globacom, to attempt to speed up competitors within the telecom market.
However a combination of mismanagement and wider difficulties contributed to the sluggish unfold of broadband, as Spectrum reported in 2004. Broadband entry has soared since then, and but Aliyu of Phase3 Telecom estimates that the nation is utilizing solely round 25 % of the whole capability of its undersea cables.
Nigeria’s unreliable electrical energy drives up telecom costs, making it tougher for poor Nigerians to afford broadband. The spotty energy grid signifies that normal telecom tools wants backup energy. However battery or diesel-powered cellphone towers appeal to theft, which in flip undermines community reliability. Energy outages happen with such frequency that even when the lights and air con exit throughout in-person conferences, it arouses no remark.
A go to to Nitel’s former headquarters, a 32-story skyscraper with antennas and a lighthouse perched on prime, is revealing. Telecom marketing consultant Jubril Adesina leads the best way into the once-grand entrance, the place armed guards wave guests previous inoperative turnstiles.
Our vacation spot is NTEL, a personal agency that inherited a lot of Nitel’s mantle, on the seventeenth ground. Adesina is explaining how a latest cellular tariff enhance will enhance cellular penetration, however once we attain the elevator foyer, he stops speaking. The facility is out once more. His eyes flip to the unlit indicator alongside the shut elevators, then he seems on the stairs and whispers, “We will’t.”
As a substitute, Adesina walks round to the again of the constructing and greets NTEL chief data officer Anthony Adegbola, who together with a small group of engineers and technicians guards one other relic of Nigeria’s telecom previous. We stroll alongside a hallway previous rooms with empty desks and previous desktop computer systems and down a brief staircase. Cables snake alongside the ceiling and above a door. Past the door, the lads level proudly to SAT-3, Nigeria’s first high-speed undersea cable, rising alongside {an electrical} grounding cable from the tiled ground. Server racks home out of date coaxial cable packing containers, displayed as if in a museum, subsequent to at present’s fiber-optic packing containers. For the reason that final time Spectrum visited, engineers have expanded SAT-3’s capability from 120 gigabits per second to 1.4 terabits per second, Adegbola says, because of enhancements in knowledge transmission by way of completely different wavelengths, and higher receiving packing containers within the room. NTEL backs up the grid electrical energy with a battery financial institution and two mills.
In Nigeria, cellular broadband is in style
What is commonly lacking in Nigeria is the native connection, the previous few kilometers resulting in clients. Within the developed world, that connection works like this: Web service suppliers (ISPs) plug into the closest spine by way of one in all a number of applied sciences and ship a small slice of bandwidth to their enterprise and residential clients. A switching station known as a level of presence (PoP) serves as an on- and off-ramp between the spine and the ISPs. The ISPs are answerable for putting in the fiber-optic cables that result in their clients; they could additionally use microwave antennas to beam a sign to clients.
However in Nigeria, fiber-optic ISPs have been sluggish to seize market share. Of the nation’s 300,000 or so fixed-line broadband subscribers—which attain simply 0.001 % of Nigerians—a few third are served by the main ISP, Spectranet. By comparability, the typical fastened broadband penetration charge amongst nations within the Organisation for Financial Co-operation and Improvement (OECD) was 42.5 % in 2023, led by South Korea, with 89.6 % penetration.
Starlink’s satellite-based service, launched in Nigeria in 2023, is now the second largest broadband ISP, with about 60,000 subscribers. That’s virtually triple the third largest ISP, FiberOne. Satellite tv for pc is outcompeting fiber as a result of it’s extra dependable and has greater speeds and tolerable latency, although it prices extra. A Starlink satellite tv for pc terminal can serve as much as 200 subscribers and retails for about US $200 plus a $37 month-to-month price. A comparable fiber-to-the-home plan in Abuja, the place the median month-to-month take-home pay is $280, prices about $19 a month.
In the meantime, Nigeria has 142 million mobile subscriptions, and so most Web customers entry the Web wirelessly, by way of a cellular community. In different phrases, Nigeria’s cellular market is sort of 500 occasions as huge as the marketplace for fastened broadband. The cellular networks additionally depend on the fiber-optic backbones, however as an alternative of utilizing PoP gateways, they hyperlink to mobile base stations, every of which might attain as much as 1000’s of cellular gadgets however might not provide preferrred high quality of service.
Cellular Web is an efficient factor for individuals who can afford it, which is most Nigerians, in line with the Worldwide Telecommunication Union. The price of fixed-line broadband remains to be round 5 occasions as a lot, which explains why its market share is so tiny. However cellular Web isn’t sufficient to run many companies, nor do cellular community operators assure community speeds or low latency, that are essential components for high-frequency buying and selling, telemedicine, and e-commerce, and for white-collar jobs requiring streaming video calls.
Nigeria is 129th on the planet in Web speeds
Web speeds throughout Nigeria range, however broadband tester Ookla’s spring 2025 median for fastened broadband was 28 megabits per second for downloads and 15 Mb/s for uploads, with latency of 25 milliseconds. That places Nigeria 129th on the planet for fastened broadband. In Might, Starlink delivered obtain speeds between 44 and 50 Mb/s, uploads of round 12 Mb/s, and latency of round 61 ms. The highest nation, Singapore, averaged 393 Mb/s down and 286 Mb/s up, with 4 ms latency. And people numbers for Nigeria don’t seize the impact of unpredictable electrical energy cuts.
Steve A. Adeshina, a pc engineering professor and machine-vision skilled at Nile College, within the capital metropolis of Abuja, says he routinely runs up in opposition to the boundaries of Nigeria’s broadband community. That’s why he retains two private mobile modems on his desk. His college contracts with a number of Web suppliers, however the broadband in his lab remains to be intermittent. For machine-vision analysis, with its enormous datasets, failing to add knowledge saved on his native machine to the extra highly effective cloud processor the place he runs his experiments means failing to work. “We now have optical fiber, however we aren’t getting worth for cash,” Adeshina says. If he wakes as much as a failed in a single day knowledge add, he has to start out it yet again.
There are lots of causes for the gradual Web, however chief amongst them are frequent cable cuts—50,000 in 2024, in line with the federal authorities. The issue is so unhealthy that in February, the federal government established a committee to stop community blackouts as a result of cable cuts throughout highway development, which it blamed for 60 % of the incidents.
“The problem is reaching the hinterland,” Aliyu of Phase3 Telecom says, and holding traces intact as soon as there. To make his level, Aliyu, wearing a quick three-piece go well with and pink tie, drives an organization pickup truck from Phase3’s well-appointed places of work in a leafy a part of Abuja to a close-by ring highway. He pulls over within the shade of an overpass and steps onto the grime shoulder. A concrete manhole cowl sits perched alongside one fringe of an open manhole, wanting just like the lid of a sarcophagus.
Pointing on the gap, Aliyu explains how straightforward it’s for native gangs, known as space boys, to steal parts or reduce the cables, forcing spine suppliers and ISPs to strike unofficial safety offers with the boys, or the extra highly effective, shadowy males behind them. After all, a part of the issue is self-inflicted: Sloppy work crews go away manholes open and expose the cables to potential harm from nesting animals or a stray cigarette butt that ignites tumbleweed and melts the cables.
Phase3 and different telecom corporations are additionally contending with the expense of changing the primary era of fiber-optic cables, now about 20 years previous, in addition to upgrading PoP {hardware} to extend capability. They’re spending cash not simply to succeed in new clients, but additionally to offer aggressive service to present clients.
For cellular operators akin to Globacom, there’s the extra problem of making certain dependable energy for his or her base stations. They usually depend on diesel or gasoline mills to again up grid energy, however gas shortage, infrastructure theft, and provide chain points can undermine base station reliability.
How Nigeria’s offline half lives
The hamlet of Tungan Ashere is 3 km northwest of the most important worldwide airport serving Abuja. To get right here, you permit the freeway and drive previous cinder-block huts with conventional reed roofs. The facet of the grime highway is adorned with concrete pylons ready to be strung with energy traces however nonetheless bare because the day they have been put in in 2021. Individuals right here farm cassava, watermelon, yam, and corn. Some maintain small herds of goats and cattle. To get to market, they’ll trip on one in all a handful of dirt-bike taxis.
When somebody in Tungan Ashere needs to make an announcement, they stroll to a outstanding tree and ring a inexperienced bar of scrap steel wedged at about head peak within the tree’s branches. The steel resonates, not fairly like a church bell, nevertheless it serves an analogous function. “The bell, it’s to inform all people to fall asleep, to get up, if there’s an announcement. It’s an historical approach of speaking,” explains Lukman Aliu, a telecom engineer who drove me right here.
The idea of connectivity within the village differs from only a few kilometers away on the airport, the place passengers can take pleasure in free high-speed Wi-Fi within the consolation of a café. But the potential advantages of reasonably priced broadband entry for individuals residing in locations like Tungan Ashere are huge.
Usman Isah Dandari is making an attempt to satisfy that want. He’s a technical assistant on the Centre for Info Expertise and Improvement (CITAD), a nonprofit based mostly in Kano, Nigeria. Dandari coordinates a handful of group networking initiatives, together with one in Tungan Ashere. Higher broadband right here would assist farmers monitor market costs, assist college students full their homework, and make it simpler for farmers and craftspeople to promote their items. CITAD makes use of a combination of {hardware}, together with Starlink terminals and mobile modems, to supply comparatively dependable broadband to areas uncared for by industrial operators. The group can also be contemplating utilizing Nigeria’s nationwide satellite tv for pc operator, NigComSat, and dealing with the Nigerian Communications Fee to decrease the prices.
A number of meters away from the scrap-metal bell in Tungan Ashere is a one-story constructing painted rust pink, topped with a pastel inexperienced corrugated steel roof and eight photo voltaic panels, which energy a pc lab inside. There’s no grid electrical energy right here, however the photo voltaic panels are sufficient to run a CITAD-provided mobile modem, a couple of desktop computer systems, and a formidable ground fan among the time.
Most of the individuals within the village as soon as lived the place the airport is now. The Nigerian authorities displaced them when it selected the area as the brand new federal capital territory in 1991. Since then, successive native governments have offered companies piecemeal, normally within the runup to elections. The result’s a string of communities like Tungan Ashere—10,000 individuals in all—that also lack working water, paved roads, grid electrical energy, and dependable Web. These individuals might dwell on the sting of Nigeria’s broadband spine, however they reap few of its advantages.
A personal undersea cable reveals find out how to do it
Not each undersea cable rollout has been fraught. In 2005, electrical engineer Funke Opeke was working at Verizon Communications in america. MTN, an African telecom firm, employed her to assist it construct its submarine cables. Then Nitel employed her to assist handle its privatization. There, she noticed up shut how the group was failing to get the Web from SAT-3 into Nigerians’ lives.
“I don’t suppose it was a query of capital or return on funding, coverage, or curiosity,” Opeke says. As a substitute, officers favored suppliers providing kickbacks over these with competent bids.
Seeing a chance for a well-managed submarine cable, Opeke approached non-public traders about creating a cable of their very own. The result’s the MainOne cable, which arrived in Lagos in 2010 and is operated by the corporate of the identical identify. MainOne supplied the primary non-public competitors to Nitel’s SAT-3 and Globacom’s Glo-1, which started service in 2010. (MTN’s two cables landed in Nigeria in 2011.)
At first, the MainOne cable suffered the identical downside because the others—its capability wasn’t reaching customers. “After we constructed, there was no distribution,” Opeke, who’s now an advisor with MainOne, says. So the corporate obtained its personal ISP license and commenced constructing fiber hyperlinks into main metro areas—finally greater than 1,200 km in states close to its undersea-cable touchdown website. It ended up providing a extra full service than initially meant, bringing the Web from abroad, onshore, throughout Nigeria, and the final kilometers into companies and houses, and it attracted greater than 800 enterprise purchasers.
MainOne’s success compelled the publicly held telecoms and the cellular suppliers to compete. “The cellular networks have been constructed for voice, and so they weren’t investing quick sufficient” in knowledge capability, Opeke says. MainOne did make investments, serving to to create the broadband capability wanted for Nigeria’s first knowledge facilities. It then diversified into knowledge facilities, and in 2022 bought its entire enterprise to American data-center big Equinix.
Different corporations, together with the most important cellular operators, additionally started constructing fiber between Nigerian cities, duplicating one another’s infrastructure. The issue is that they didn’t provide aggressive costs to impartial ISPs that needed to piggyback on these new fiber-optic hyperlinks, says the telecom analyst Odufuwa.
And neither the general public sector nor the non-public sector is assembly the wants of Nigerians on the backside of the market, particularly in rural communities akin to Tungan Ashere and Atan. A vital first step shall be to enhance the reliability of {the electrical} grid, Opeke says, which is able to assist drive down prices for telecom operators and different companies, and create a virtuous cycle for additional development.
Virtually everybody Spectrum interviewed for this story stated safety is one other problem: If Nigerian states and the federal authorities might make sure the safety of the infrastructure, telecom operators would make investments extra in increasing their networks. Constructing telecom infrastructure is properly throughout the attain of Nigerian engineers. “Nigeria doesn’t have a ability downside,” Opeke says. “It has a chance downside.”
If the bureaucrats, businesspeople, and engineers can overcome these coverage and technical hurdles, the unconnected half of Nigerians stand to achieve rather a lot. Dependable broadband in Atan would draw extra younger individuals to agriculture, says the farmer and sociologist Bolaji Adeniyi: “It would present jobs.” Then, like Adeniyi, possibly these younger linked Nigerians will rethink whether or not farming is simply father’s work—maybe it may very well be their future, too.
Particular because of IEEE Senior Member John Funso-Adebayo for his help with the logistics and reporting for this story.
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