Dr. Aminu Maida is the Executive Vice Chairman/CEO of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). In this interview, he discusses what NCC is doing to improve consumer experience in the telecom sector as well as increasing demand on networks for services.
From the NCC's perspective, what constitutes a good consumer experience in telecommunications, and is it limited to the quality of calls and data services?
For us at the Commission, Quality of Experience covers the entire journey of a consumer while using telecommunication services.
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It is the experience you have right from the point when you decide, do I want a mobile connection or a fixed connection? Which service provider should I select? And when I decide on the service provider I want to use, how do I purchase the services of the service provider? And while I am using it, if I have a complaint, how do I escalate that complaint? And of course, if I decide I no longer want to be with that service provider, how do I either retire from the service or move to another service provider?
So, experience for us at the Commission is across the entire life cycle of your use of telecom services. Now, the most important and pressing one, which is the main value you expect when you pay, is the quality of the network's performance. Typically, when people talk about quality of service, that is what they refer to.
Let's look at the quality of service versus the experience. What's the distinction between these two, and why should it matter to ordinary consumers?
When I resumed in 2023, I shifted our focus from quality of service--which is basically measuring just the network performance from the perspective of the network--to quality of experience, which as I earlier mentioned, covers the entire journey of a consumer, from the point of where you decide you want a service to the point where you might want to retire or move to another network.
Now, while the quality of experience is all-encompassing, let us focus on the network performance side of it. We no longer look at network performance from just the perspective of the network; today, we look at the network's performance from the perspective of the user. We now have platforms that are reporting the user's own experience, as opposed to just the network's performance.
I'll give you an example: If we look at just the network performance, when you have a situation where the network is down, we would not have a view of exactly what the consumer is experiencing, or in the event where one tower is down and it is putting more stress on surrounding towers. In that situation, the experience as a consumer would slightly degrade, but the consumer would still be connected.
What is the current state of data consumption in Nigeria?
In a forum recently, I quoted 1.6 million terabytes. But, that was July's consumption. Consumption as of August 2026 has actually risen to 1.75 million terabytes. We are already seeing an average of over 5% monthly growth in consumption, and a 39% increase from just February to August this year. And if we continue at this rate, we might get to 2 million terabytes by December.
There is an increasing demand on the networks: average network speeds are going up, even as GDP contribution is going up. And concurrently, you can also see that investment activities within the sector are increasing, even as consumption is rising, at the same time user experience is also moving in the right direction. It is not where it needs to be, but the important thing is that we are moving in the right direction.
Do you have tools to make consumers make their choices?
Absolutely. So today, if you go to our website, we have a national coverage map. Now, this coverage map shows you the performance of networks across the country, across the major providers. It is based on data which users are contributing, which we call crowdsourcing.
This crowdsourced data gives us an accurate view of the performance of the network. So again, as part of the selection process when we are speaking of quality of experience, you can now on your own check which is the best network in Kuje or Gwagwalada. You can come to the Commission's website, type in the location you want, and you'll see whether it is Globacom, MTN, or Airtel, or any other network. It would tell you if they are available there, or not. And if they are available, how do they perform compared to other networks?
Why does Nigeria operate a cost reflective tariff?
Let me give some context before I get to the answer. The NCC has not given the operators a blank check. Let's go back a little bit into history when this industry was liberalised. Imagine a situation in Nigeria about two-and-a-half decades ago. We had only 500,000 telephone lines at that time. This was around the time of our return to democracy, around the early 2000s.
Now, the government at the time was faced with a situation where Nigeria was in the bottom three in the global teledensity ranking--teledensity is the number of lines per 1,000 population--together with Afghanistan and Mongolia. And this was Afghanistan that was at war. So it was not a good place to be. The Federal Government, under President Obasanjo put in place a telecoms policy (NTP 2000) to address the situation. The foundational principles of that policy were around the liberalisation of the markets in order to attract investments that will build fit for purpose networks and get us out of the bottom three teledensity ranking.
This policy led to the Nigerian Communications Act, 2003. And in that Act, one of the functions of the NCC is to create a vibrant industry and attract investments. There's also another part of the Act that mandates that service tariffs must be cost-reflective. So I'm telling you this just to point out to you that it was a deliberate government policy, and there is a law passed by Parliament and assented to by the President at the time that actually states that tariffs should be cost-reflective.
So now, why is that important? As an investor, if you put one dollar into a business, or one Naira into a business, and you are getting one Naira back, then you are running a social service. And we have seen, as I took my time to remind you, the experience of NITEL. So the law, and policy are designed so that service tariffs are cost-reflective, which basically means they can recover their costs, and can make a fair margin.
Now, our role in the tariff setting process is not to set the price. It is to model the price, which is also contained in the Act. To do this modeling we benchmark the local operators to see what their cost structure looks like.
Once we do the modelling then we set a price range within which operators can set a price that enables investors to earn a fair return and there can be healthy competition within the market. This is very important for foreign investment because foreign capital is very mobile. It will go to where it will get returns.
Unfortunately, in the past decade we deviated from these principles. In fact, there were two occasions where the operators tried to adjust tariffs based on inflation, but it was stopped. Now was this the right thing to do? Prices typically go up in all economies as a result of inflation.
There is also a heavy reliance on FX in our industry. Today, there are just three countries in the world that build the major components of mobile telecom equipment i.e. the radios, switches etc. They are Sweden with Ericsson, Finland with Nokia, and finally China with ZTE and Huawei. Samsung of South Korea, though known for handsets and consumer electronics, also produces telecommunications infrastructure, but their market share is insignificant.
So if the dollar goes up, it directly affects the ability of operators to upgrade and expand the networks. And of course, with the removal of fuel subsidy and other global issues which are not in our control, operators' energy costs have gone up significantly.
All these factors put them under immense operational pressure especially considering they had not adjusted tariffs in over a decade. They got to a point in 2024 whereby they were saying that they want to start load-shedding. You know what load-shedding means in electricity? So imagine a case where at night they will shut down your network.
Did you stop them?
Of course, the NCC did.
What is the GDP contribution of the telecom sector?
Prior to 2024-2023, the GDP contribution was more or less flat around 9. But since we started the current set of reforms, it is slowly going up and it is now about 10%.
We can see that the industry is getting more vibrant. And at the same time, on the quality of experience, we can see that the average speed (one of the measures of performance) that users are experiencing is also steadily increasing.
Where are we on the zero-rated access for Nigerian students?
So let's be clear, when we say zero-rated, it is not free internet and it is not unlimited. It is an industry-driven initiative, but of course as regulators we have to ensure that the rules for such an initiative are fair and don't cause other issues, whether it is additional strain on the networks or certain operators getting an advantage over the others.
And of course, when it comes to educational content, we are not experts, so that's why we are working with the Ministry of Education.
So what is it? It is 100 megabytes per day for approved educational platforms. It is not for watching YouTube or Tik Tok videos, but for accessing approved educational platforms.
And when you look at 100 megabytes a day, it is a lot. You can download a lot of documents with 100 megabytes daily over the course of a week. If you have 100 every day, that's 700 megabytes a week. With this you can listen to a lecture, easily with multiple lectures over the course of a week. So imagine over the course of a month and over the course of a year.
The telecom sector also suffers from vandalism. From the NCC perspective, what would you say has been the biggest impact of vandalism on our telecom?
I think firstly we have to appreciate President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who signed the Executive Order in 2024 declaring the assets and infrastructure in our sector and that of some other sectors as Critical National Information Infrastructure - CNII. Basically, this has made it a serious criminal act for anybody to vandalize telecoms equipment or even to prevent access to maintainers of telecoms infrastructure.
Now why is this important and what is the impact it has had on the industry?
The telecommunications network is a complex connection of various systems across the country, and a disruption to one leg of this big connectivity maze does not just have the potential to impact locally where it happened, it can have an impact hundreds of kilometres away.
There's a very good example, I think it was in early 2024 where there was a fibre cut somewhere in the North Central and at the same time on the backup fibre there was a bush burning. So, the south of the country was disconnected from the north of the country for some time before they could repair it.
That day one of the networks was unable to offer optimal services, and when people tried to move to other networks, those networks became overloaded.
So that was a very clear example of what vandalism can do to our experience on the network. And it is not just me and you making calls, like I was describing, hospitals too depend on connectivity, schools depend on connectivity, financial institutions depend on connectivity.
So every time you disrupt telecoms infrastructure, you are actually disrupting people in their daily lives. That is why it is very, very important that we take the protection of our infrastructure very, very seriously.
A lot of the times when you see poor network quality or outages, it could be because a fibre cable was damaged through road construction. Thankfully, we are now addressing this through a collaboration facilitated by the office of the NSA, where we brought the Federal Ministry of Works, ourselves, with the operators in the sector under us to put in place a framework where before any work happens, we notify everybody and time is given for operators to relocate their fibre and telecoms infrastructure prior to commencement of work.
And we have actually seen successes in certain areas. Certain states are more mature than others in this respect. Edo is a very good example of where this collaboration has led to a significant reduction in damage to telecoms infrastructure.
And there's also the issue of access denial, like I mentioned. It happens where unfortunately some government agencies who are trying to collect revenue, whether justifiably or not, go to a telecom site and then deny access to operators. Sometimes it might be access to a site that is critical to 10 or 20 other sites. If that site goes down, those other dependent sites can also go down.
Or it could also happen when a landlord would just go and prevent access and say, pay me more rent, these are actually occurrences that happen on a daily basis in our industry today and ultimately degrade service quality.
But thank God to this Presidential Order and the push and efforts by the Office of the National Security Adviser; the National Security Adviser himself is very supportive of this, we are making slow and steady progress towards rectifying some of these issues.
Explain the issue of compensation. Do you have a template and how effective is it?
It's a broader part of our strategy towards driving compliance. Now historically our quality of service regulations did not give us significant powers to apply the right sanctions to drive compliance. We have now made the necessary changes, and I'll touch on two areas. First, we revised the financial penalties and, second, we increased the granularity of geographical areas so that we can assess operators on their delivery of quality of service.
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So, before the regulations were amended in 2024, we used to hold operators accountable at a sub-national level. We would look at their performance at FCT or at Lagos level and say, okay, have you met performance or have you not met performance?
But what that did is it hid performance issues in certain areas--the network could be on the average excellent in the FCT but very poor in say Maitama for instance. We thus amended the regulation and now if NCC wants to hold an operator down to a street level, we can do that.
So, what we are doing now is we are holding them accountable to a Local Government level. We look at their performance on a monthly level. Have you met the network performance at a monthly level? If the answer is yes, fine. If the answer is no, we apply the sanctions.
But the sanctions we are applying now, they are not only monetary sanctions. We have also again through the powers we have, converted some of those sanctions to compensation to the consumer.
We do the compensation quarterly and we are going through the second cycle now and I know at least one network, I think two weeks ago, that has completed or partially completed the compensation to consumers.
And I will tell you for free, it is more effective to combine compensation with monetary sanctions than just a financial penalty.
Looking ahead, what do you plan to achieve in the telecom sector?
I think in very simple terms, it is to have a more reliable and robust internet for citizens and for businesses, because that is what is going to unlock productivity in the economy.
So that's the headline that I think if you come back in three years I'll be telling you. How improved reliability of the internet and robustness of the internet has led to increased productivity within the Nigerian economy.
There are a number of things we are doing both within the NCC and the Federal Government to achieve this especially around fibre infrastructure. You are all aware of Project Bridge, the 90,000-kilometre project being driven by the Honourable Minister, which is going to improve resilience on the fibre backbone and increase the amount of fibre backbone we have.
Why is that important? Today, the cheapest and most reliable way to deliver high quality and affordable unlimited internet access is actually through fibre (that is of course when the fibre is not being damaged).
With the willingness to pay that people have for internet access, the economics of unlimited internet access only works with fibre. So that's why fibre connectivity is very, very important and critical.
Now Project Bridge is delivering more fibre, but we already have fibre connecting the entire Nigeria. I don't think there's any state in Nigeria that does not have fibre.
One of the key interventions that NCC is currently working on is to open up that fibre access. Because today what is happening is that fibre backbone is owned mainly by the mobile operators, and the reason why they have it is to connect their towers. But we need fibre into buildings--homes, businesses, public spaces--so that we can have unlimited internet over Wi-Fi which would also reduce the strain on the mobile networks.
