9mobile subscribers groan over service downtime

• Firm promises improvement soon
Customers of telecoms firm, 9mobile, have lamented the continuous decline in the firm’s service offerings in Nigeria.

Apart from persistent loss of network, subscribers, who explored the social media space to vent their angers, also complained of their inability to port out of the network.

More worrisome, according to them, is the fact that the customer services have equally been on the lowest ebb.

For about five weeks, subscribers have called on the telecoms regulator to intervene and rescue the firm and subscribers. Some are even asking for compensation for time wasted on the network.

But a very senior executive of the telecoms firm, who spoke with The Guardian, at a telecoms conference in Lagos, said the firm was very much on ground and working to revamp its services.

This challenge showed that 9mobile, which had about 20 million subscribers and about 15 per cent market share about five years ago, as of January 2025, was struggling to keep its remaining 3.3 million users and 1.94 per cent market reach.

Taking to X, @suleman_Tanimu, wrote: “9mobile needs to do one thing, at least make your porting service available so that customers can port to other preferred service providers. I’ve been visiting MTN office in Abuja for the past three weeks and the customer care keeps telling me that 9mobile porting service is down.”

@Ifoye, NgComCommission: “9mobile network has been down in Ibadan for over two weeks with no recovery date in sight. It is also impossible to port 9mobile numbers to other networks because they require 9mobile network to be on before that can be done. Kindly see to this because the implications are many for bank account owners, business, applicants, clients with prepaid subscriptions, etc.”

@DforDust writes: “9mobile has been unavailable for a month, a whole month. There’s no regulatory body dragging them, there’s no message from 9mobile about what’s going on. You know how many businesses some people would have lost because of that.”

Why customers raged, the senior executive appealed to the customers to bear with the telecoms firm.

According to him, the firm is currently carrying out a major infrastructure upgrade across the country.

He promised that in the next two months services should get better.