Reviewing 2025, the Association of Telecommunication Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) has described the operating environment in the outgoing year as far from easy.

ATCON President, Tony Emoekpere, while reviewing 2025 and projecting into 2026, said telecom operators, tower companies, fibre infrastructure providers, Internet service providers, and data-centre operators all had to contend with rising energy costs, foreign exchange volatility, equipment import pressures, Right-of-Way challenges, and persistent infrastructure risks.

“Yet, the most important story of 2025 is that the industry did not retreat. Instead, telecom companies across the value chain continued to expand and densify their networks in high-demand corridors, upgrade site power solutions, accelerate the transition to solar and hybrid energy systems to improve uptime and reduce diesel dependency, invest in backbone, metro, and access fibre to support rising data demand, optimise networks and maintain service availability despite cost pressures.

Beyond physical infrastructure and private-sector investment, Emoekpere said government stewardship through both regulation and policy was a critical pillar of sector performance in 2025. On the regulatory front, he said the Nigerian Communications Commission played a steadying and confidence-building role throughout the year.

According to him, at a time of economic uncertainty, the Commission’s actions helped preserve stability and predictability across the industry. He said this consistency in regulatory oversight was essential in sustaining investor confidence. In capital-intensive sectors like telecommunications, regulatory certainty often determines whether long-term projects proceed or stall.

Complementing regulatory stability, policy leadership, and strategic direction were provided by the Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, under the leadership of the minister, Bosun Tijani.

He said during 2025, several government-led initiatives were announced or advanced to strengthen Nigeria’s long-term digital foundations, including Project BRIDGE, the proposed 90,000-kilometre open-access national fibre backbone aimed at closing connectivity gaps, reducing infrastructure duplication, and lowering wholesale bandwidth costs; expansion of digital inclusion and rural connectivity programmes, including Project 774 and initiatives supported by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF).

Others are scaling digital skills development through the 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme, focused on building capacity in software development, cloud computing, cybersecurity, data, and artificial intelligence.

He also listed the advancement of Nigeria’s National AI Strategy, positioning the country early in AI governance, ethics, and adoption across public and private sectors.

Projecting into 2026, the ATCON President said the sector is set for accelerated growth, with operators planning to expand fibre networks, data centres, and digital infrastructure.

Emoekpere said the outlook for the telecom sector in 2026 is positive, driven by three reinforcing forces: industry-led expansion, regulatory alignment, and rising digital demand.

The ATCON president said operators and infrastructure providers are expected to intensify investment across several fronts.

“Accelerating fibre rollout and densification using open-access and wholesale models, deepening infrastructure sharing across towers, fibre, and power systems, expanding last-mile broadband access through FTTH, FWA, enterprise connectivity, and neutral-host solutions, increasing investment in data centres and cloud-ready infrastructure, improving network resilience, redundancy, and energy efficiency,” he said.

“These investments are being driven by strong demand signals from fintech, digital payments, cloud services, content platforms, AI workloads, and enterprise customers.”

Emoekpere said policy execution will also be critical, including the protection of telecom assets, right-of-way harmonisation, and reduction of multiple taxation — measures that encourage private-sector investment.

The ATCON boss said the association’s focus will be to champion infrastructure expansion and open-access networks, support regulatory consistency and QoS enforcement, push for RoW harmonisation and infrastructure protection, strengthen collaboration between industry, regulators, ministries, and security agencies, and amplify the voice of indigenous operators and infrastructure providers.