Below the shade of a cocoa tree exterior the hamlet of Atan, close to Ibadan, Nigeria, Bolaji Adeniyi holds court docket 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. Today, he says, farming in Nigeria can look fairly totally different, relying on whether or not the farmer has entry to the Web or not.
Not distant, farmers are utilizing drones to map their plots and calculate their fertilizer inputs. Elsewhere, farmers can swipe via safety digicam footage of their fields on their cell phones. That saves them from having to patrol the farm’s perimeter and doubtlessly harmful confrontations with thieves. To have the ability to do these issues, Adeniyi notes, the farmers want broadband entry, at the very least among the time. “Dependable broadband in Atan would appeal to worldwide cocoa sellers and allow entry to agricultural extension brokers, which might help 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 ok Web. However at his farm in Atan, he carries a candy-bar cell phone and should trek to 1 of some spots across the settlement if he desires 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 latest 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 large telecom operators proceed to construct long-distance, high-capacity fiber-optic networks from the cables to the essential industrial nodes within the cities. However distribution to the city peripheries and to rural locations similar to Atan remains to be incomplete.
Incomplete is an understatement: Less than half of the nation’s 237 million folks have common entry to broadband, with that entry principally taking place via mobile devices reasonably than extra secure mounted connections. Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Financial system has set a objective to nearly double the size of the nation’s fiber-optic spine and for broadband to achieve 70 percent of the population by the top of this 12 months. However the ministry additionally claimed in 2024 that it will 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 power 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 12 months, I talked to dozens of individuals about broadband’s affect on their lives. For greater than 20 years, the nation has possessed an unbelievable portal to the world, and so I had hoped to listen to tales of transformation. In some circumstances, 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 in every single place in Nigeria is roofed with long-haul cables,” says Abdullateef Aliyu, normal supervisor for initiatives at Phase3 Telecom, which is chargeable for maybe 10,000 km of these cables. Most Nigerian cities have at the very least one fiber-optic spine, and the largest 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, but it surely had higher be “affected person cash.”
A Phase3 Telecom employee [left] installs fiber-optic cables on energy poles in Abuja, Nigeria. Abdullateef Aliyu [right], Phase3’s normal supervisor for initiatives, says the nation is utilizing solely round 25 % of the capability of its undersea cables.Andrew Esiebo
Unsurprisingly, the shoppers that bought broadband first had been these with impatient cash, people who might provide the perfect return to the telecom companies: the oil firms 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, purchasing plazas host overseas fast-food franchises and cafés.
From their perch close to the submarine community, the banks realized that cell broadband would enable them to achieve 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 cell funds, financial institution apps, and different monetary apps, Nigerians can conduct handy cellphone transactions for something from road meals to airplane tickets. The central bank’s platform was so successful that till just lately, it dealt with more cash than its U.S. equivalents.
Simply as essential 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 cell funds. Uber drivers assume nothing of sharing their checking account numbers with passengers, in order that the passengers pays their fares through prompt fee. A Nigerian engineer defined to me that many individuals want that to disclosing their bank-card info 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 easily pirated DVDs to paywalled streaming platforms. Then again, streaming platforms made it simpler for Nigerians to entry overseas 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 an alternative, 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 Folks, a web-based college, is focused on a graphics or product-design job when she graduates. However a broadband-enabled aspect hustle is beginning to appear to be a viable various, she advised 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.
Pc science scholar Emmanuella Njoku has discovered a broadband-enabled aspect gig: creating YouTube movies.Andrew Esiebo
A pal of hers had just lately crossed the 100,000-follower threshold with YouTube movies targeted on visits to high-end eating places round Lagos. The pal anticipated eating places and different firms to begin paying her for visits, along with accumulating her tiny reduce of YouTube’s advert income.
Each ladies stated they’d want jobs that enable them to telecommute, a extra life like prospect in Nigeria in the previous couple of years because of the provision of broadband. Extra firms are open to distant work and hybrid work, says telecom analyst Fola Odufuwa. That’s very true in Lagos, the place gasoline shortages and world-class visitors jams encourage folks 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 University of Technology researcher in Owerri carrying handwritten messages to a contact, who had a pc with an Web connection and would sort up the messages and ship them as emails. At the moment researchers on the Federal University of Technology campus in Minna collaborate nearly with colleagues in Europe on an Web of Issues demonstration undertaking. Whereas some occasions happen in individual, the collaborators additionally alternate emails, meet by videoconference, and work on joint publications through 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 %).
Pc Village in Lagos is Nigeria’s primary hub for electronics.Andrew Esiebo
Alcatel (now a part of Nokia) linked SAT-3 to Nigeria’s primary switching station in December 2001, simply a few years into the primary secure democratic authorities since independence in 1960. The state-run phone monopoly, Nigerian Telecommunications (Nitel), was primarily chargeable for the rollout of SAT-3 throughout the nation. Lower than 1 % of the 130 million Nigerians had cellphone strains in 2002, so the federal government established a second service, 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 entire 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 implies that commonplace 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 guide Jubril Adesina leads the best way into the once-grand entrance, the place armed guards wave guests previous inoperative turnstiles.
NTEL’s chief info officer, Anthony Adegbola, inspects broadband tools on the firm’s knowledge middle in Lagos, which nonetheless homes out of date coaxial cable packing containers [top]. Andrew Esiebo
Our vacation spot is NTEL, a non-public agency that inherited much of Nitel’s mantle, on the seventeenth flooring. Adesina is explaining how a current cell tariff improve will enhance cell penetration, however after 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 an alternative, Adesina walks round to the again of the constructing and greets NTEL chief info officer Anthony Adegbola, who together with a small workforce of engineers and technicians guards one other relic of Nigeria’s telecom previous. We stroll alongside a hallway previous rooms with empty desks and outdated 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 flooring. Server racks home out of date coaxial cable packing containers, displayed as if in a museum, subsequent to as we speak’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 through totally 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, cell broadband is standard
What is commonly lacking in Nigeria is the native connection, the previous couple of kilometers resulting in clients. Within the developed world, that connection works like this: Web service suppliers (ISPs) plug into the closest spine through certainly one of a number of applied sciences and ship a small slice of bandwidth to their enterprise and residential clients. A switching station known as a point of presence (PoP) serves as an on- and off-ramp between the spine and the ISPs. The ISPs are chargeable 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 mounted broadband penetration charge amongst nations within the Organisation for Financial Co-operation and Growth (OECD) was 42.5 percent in 2023, led by South Korea, with 89.6 % penetration.
Starlink’s satellite-based service, introduced in Nigeria in 2023, is now the second largest broadband ISP, with about 60,000 subscribers. That’s nearly triple the third largest ISP, FiberOne. Satellite tv for pc is outcompeting fiber as a result of it’s extra dependable and has higher speeds and tolerable latency, despite the fact that 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 Lagos’s Pc Village, you should purchase or promote a cell phone or laptop, or get yours repaired.Andrew Esiebo
In the meantime, Nigeria has 142 million cellular subscriptions, and so most Web customers entry the Web wirelessly, through a cell community. In different phrases, Nigeria’s cell market is sort of 500 occasions as large as the marketplace for mounted broadband. The cell 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 may attain as much as 1000’s of cell gadgets however could not provide perfect high quality of service.
Cell Web is an efficient factor for individuals who can afford it, which is most Nigerians, in keeping with the International 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 cell Web isn’t sufficient to run many companies, nor do cell community operators assure community speeds or low latency, that are essential elements for high-frequency buying and selling, telemedicine, and e-commerce, and for white-collar jobs requiring streaming video calls.
Nigeria is 129th on the earth in Web speeds
Web speeds throughout Nigeria range, however broadband tester Ookla’s spring 2025 median for mounted 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 earth for mounted 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 knowledgeable at Nile University, within the capital metropolis of Abuja, says he routinely runs up in opposition to the bounds 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’ve optical fiber, however we’re not getting worth for cash,” Adeshina says. If he wakes as much as a failed in a single day knowledge add, he has to begin it yet again.
Fiber-optic cable spills from an open manhole in Lagos. Native gangs could reduce the cables or steal elements. Andrew Esiebo
There are lots of causes for the gradual Web, however chief amongst them are frequent cable cuts—50,000 in 2024, in keeping with the federal authorities. The issue is so dangerous that in February, the federal government established a committee to forestall community blackouts because of cable cuts throughout highway building, which it blamed for 60 % of the incidents.
“The problem is reaching the hinterland,” Aliyu of Phase3 Telecom says, and preserving strains intact as soon as there. To make his level, Aliyu, wearing a quick three-piece go well with and crimson 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 filth shoulder. A concrete manhole cowl sits perched alongside one fringe of an open manhole, trying 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 elements 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 injury from nesting animals or a stray cigarette butt that ignites tumbleweed and melts the cables.
Phase3 and different telecom firms are additionally contending with the expense of changing the primary technology of fiber-optic cables, now about 20 years outdated, in addition to upgrading PoP {hardware} to extend capability. They’re spending cash not simply to achieve new clients, but additionally to offer aggressive service to present clients.
For cell operators similar 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 gasoline 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 main worldwide airport serving Abuja. To get right here, you allow the freeway and drive previous cinder-block huts with conventional reed roofs. The aspect of the filth highway is adorned with concrete pylons ready to be strung with energy strains however nonetheless bare because the day they had been put in in 2021. Folks right here farm cassava, watermelon, yam, and corn. Some hold small herds of goats and cattle. To get to market, they’ll journey on certainly one of a handful of dirt-bike taxis.
In Tungan Ashere, the Web hub operated by the Centre for Data Know-how and Growth attracts residents.Andrew Esiebo
When somebody in Tungan Ashere desires to make an announcement, they stroll to a distinguished 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, but it surely serves an identical function. “The bell, it’s to inform everyone to fall asleep, to get up, if there’s an announcement. It’s an historic manner 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 inexpensive broadband entry for folks residing in locations like Tungan Ashere are huge.
Usman Isah Dandari is attempting to fulfill that want. He’s a technical assistant on the Centre for Information Technology and Development (CITAD), a nonprofit primarily based 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.
Usman Isah Dandari [standing] coordinates a number of initiatives just like the one in Tungan Ashere, to offer inexpensive broadband entry.Andrew Esiebo
A couple of meters away from the scrap-metal bell in Tungan Ashere is a one-story constructing painted rust crimson, 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 number of desktop computer systems, and a formidable flooring fan among the time.
Most of the folks 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 providers piecemeal, normally within the runup to elections. The result’s a string of communities like Tungan Ashere—10,000 folks in all—that also lack operating water, paved roads, grid electrical energy, and dependable Web. These folks could reside on the sting of Nigeria’s broadband spine, however they reap few of its advantages.
A non-public undersea cable reveals how you can do it
Not each undersea cable rollout has been fraught. In 2005, electrical engineer Funke Opeke was working at Verizon Communications in the US. 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.
Funke Opeke based MainOne to construct Nigeria’s first non-public undersea fiber-optic cable.George Osodi/Bloomberg/Getty Photographs
“I don’t assume it was a query of capital or return on funding, coverage, or curiosity,” Opeke says. As an alternative, 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 bought its personal ISP license and started constructing fiber hyperlinks into main metro areas—finally more than 1,200 km in states close to its undersea-cable touchdown web site. It ended up providing a extra full service than initially supposed, 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 pressured the publicly held telecoms and the cell suppliers to compete. “The cell networks had 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 firms, together with the main cell operators, additionally started constructing fiber between Nigerian cities, duplicating one another’s infrastructure. The issue is that they didn’t provide aggressive costs to unbiased 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 similar to Tungan Ashere and Atan. A vital first step might be to enhance the reliability of {the electrical} grid, Opeke says, which can assist drive down prices for telecom operators and different companies, and create a virtuous cycle for additional development.
Nearly 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 effectively 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 quite a bit. Dependable broadband in Atan would draw extra younger folks to agriculture, says the farmer and sociologist Bolaji Adeniyi: “It is going to present jobs.” Then, like Adeniyi, possibly these younger linked Nigerians will rethink whether or not farming is simply father’s work—maybe it could possibly 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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