About 15 states have waived Right of Way (RoW) fees nationwide, paving the way for a more robust telephony regime.

This was announced yesterday in Lagos by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), which also announced that Nigeria has officially entered the subscriber compensation era.

The NCC Executive Vice Chairman, Dr Aminu Maida, who made the announcement during a media interaction with journalists in Lagos, said that the compensation initiative aimed to make telecoms operators more accountable and transparent in their dealings with consumers.

NCC’s Director of Technical Services, Edoyemi Ogor, further explained that the compensation would come in the form of airtime refunds.

According to Ogor, the affected subscribers will start receiving SMS alerts from tomorrow, detailing the process for applying the refunded airtime. He said the compensation would be commensurate with the affected amount and area at the time of the disruption.

Ogor, speaking on the RoW levy removal, said this would ensure that telephone services get better in those states, calling on states to expedite approval for site acquisitions.

The NCC noted that states with zero RoW fees are seeing faster expansion of fibre-optic networks, with Kaduna and Niger now ranked among the top states for total fibre deployment distance, benefiting from these pro-investment policies to reach underserved rural areas.

Maida informed that, through regulatory interventions, a particular operator has commenced deploying an additional $1 billion to upgrade and expand services, beyond the combined $1 billion deployed last year. He said 12,000 site upgrades had been pencilled down for 2026, disclosing that so far, 2,800 have been completed, covering 63 new areas.

RELATEDLY, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has approved five companies as airtime and data lenders, following new regulations that forced all Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to suspend services.

In their place, the FCCPC said that the five firms, including Total Tim Nigeria Limited, Rane Interactive Media CLS Limited, Mode NG Applications Limited, Cloud Interactive Associate Limited, and Coverage Broadband Limited, have been approved as airtime/data lenders in the country.

According to the FCCPC, the five firms have met all the requirements to provide the services as stipulated in the Digital, Electronic, Online, or Non-Traditional Consumer Lending Regulations, 2025.

However, while the telecoms operators have cited compliance issues with the new consumer lending regulations as a reason for the suspension of the services, it said that the primary aim of the regulation is to promote a fairer and more transparent system in digital lending.

MTN and Airtel have already officially announced suspending their services since last week.

Director of Corporate Affairs at the FCCPC, Ondaje Ijagwu, said some telecoms operators were found to be “engaging in exclusionary third-party technical arrangements in clear disobedience to the provisions of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act, 2018.”