From just a few fibre connections, Nigeria is racing toward a 160-fold expansion, targeting millions of homes by 2028. But this isn’t merely about faster Internet; it is the infrastructure backbone for an entire digital economy, ADEYEMI ADEPETUN writes.

Bridging Nigeria’s fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) gap has emerged as a defining challenge for the country’s digital future, with current infrastructure still struggling to keep pace with demand.
 
While major operators have announced ambitious expansion plans targeting millions of new homes, most Internet users currently rely on mobile networks, highlighting a significant disconnect between connectivity aspirations and ground realities.
 
Bridging this gap and mapping the entire country was the major discussion by industry players when the Tony Izuagbe Emoekpere-led Association of Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ATCON) organised the Critical Conversation Forum on FTTH in Lagos.
 
According to them, for Nigeria to truly unlock the potential of its digital economy, bridging the FTTH gap is non-negotiable, as fixed broadband penetration remains disproportionately low compared to the country’s population size.

Scale of the challenge
In his keynote, the Executive Vice Chairman and CEO of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr Aminu Maida, laid bare the numbers that have kept industry insiders awake at night.

While Nigeria now boasts 154.72 million active Internet subscriptions and broadband penetration has climbed to 55.67 per cent, the fixed broadband story tells a different tale entirely.
 
Just 265,000 active FTTH subscriptions exist nationwide, a figure that places Nigeria well below the African average of 2.5 per cent penetration and significantly behind the global average of 47 per cent. A gap of this magnitude is not merely a statistic; it represents millions of Nigerian homes, schools, and businesses locked out of the transformative potential of true high-speed connectivity.
 
The EVC’s message was unambiguous: mobile networks, despite their impressive reach, were never designed to deliver the full broadband experience that Nigeria needs to compete in the digital economy. The data consumption figures underscored this reality: Nigerians now consume approximately 1.4 million terabytes of data monthly, a volume that requires the robust, reliable infrastructure that only fibre can provide.

Infrastructure collides with reality
Perhaps the most sobering moment of the forum came when participants confronted the physical realities of operating fibre networks in Nigeria’s challenging environment.

Between January and December 2025, the industry recorded over 27,685 fibre cut incidents, a number so staggering it almost defies comprehension. These cuts represent service disruptions for thousands of businesses, students unable to access online learning, healthcare facilities struggling to connect with specialists, and families suddenly disconnected from the world. Add to this over 27,000 cases of access denial and 4,210 incidents of theft, and the picture of an industry under siege becomes clear.
 
Chairman of the ATCON Fibre Clean-Up Committee, Segun Okuneye, described scenes that will be familiar to anyone who has walked through Lagos streets: fibre optic cables sagging dangerously from overloaded utility poles, tangled in ways that compromise both aesthetics and safety. Years of accumulated excess cabling, unauthorised attachments, and poorly managed routing have turned what should be a model of modern infrastructure into a patchwork of operational risk. The ATCON Fibre Clean-Up Project, which has now commenced with pilot phases across high-density routes including the Ikeja corridor, Lekki Phase 1 and Victoria Island, represents the industry’s attempt to bring order to this chaos.

Unending RoW crisis
IF there was one issue that reverberated the most at the forum, it is the perennial challenge of right-of-way charges. NCC EVC disclosed that 13 states have now fully waived RoW charges, while 16 others have adopted the National Economic Council’s recommended rate of N145 per linear metre. Yet the celebration was tempered by the recognition that RoW charges represent only a fraction of the total cost of service delivery.
 
MD/CEO of VDT Communications Limited, Biodun Omoniyi, captured the collective frustration when he urged state governments to go further by legislating protective frameworks for licensed infrastructure. His concern was echoed by Chief Broadband Officer of MTN Nigeria, Egerton Idehen, who pointed to the crippling combination of formal government charges and informal levies from community development associations and land-owning interests, the notorious ‘Omo-onile’ that continue to add to deployment costs even in states that have waived formal charges.

Human face of infrastructure
Behind the policy discussions and technical presentations, the human dimension of FTTH deployment was never far from the surface. When speakers spoke of the economic benefits of fibre, they were not referring to abstract statistics but to real people whose lives could be transformed.
 
Eric Chen of Huawei reminded the audience that every 10 per cent increase in fixed broadband penetration is associated with approximately 1.5 per cent GDP growth, drawing on international experience that shows the ripple effects of connectivity on employment, productivity, and social mobility.
 
The forum heard compelling arguments for incorporating connectivity into urban and estate planning from the outset, not as an afterthought once roads and buildings are complete, but with the same priority given to electricity, water and drainage.
 
This is not a bureaucratic nicety but a matter of basic fairness; communities planned without consideration for broadband infrastructure risk being left behind in a digital economy, their children unable to access online learning, their businesses unable to compete, their residents cut off from opportunities that increasingly come through digital channels.

The infrastructure sharing solution
A recurring theme throughout the day was the recognition that Nigeria cannot afford the fragmented, siloed approach to fibre deployment that has characterised the industry to date. The model of each operator independently funding trenching, outside-plant capital expenditure and last-mile maintenance is simply unsustainable for a country of Nigeria’s scale and economic realities.
 
Izuagbe Emoekpere identified infrastructure sharing as one of the most pressing unresolved issues facing the industry, questioning whether adequate standards or frameworks currently exist to govern the volume of infrastructure deployed on shared rights-of-way and utility poles, and cited poor cable management practices on poles as a visible and urgent industry challenge requiring coordinated action.

He stated that mobile networks are not designed to deliver full broadband, positioning FTTH and other last-mile fibre technologies as the only sustainable route to achieving national broadband penetration targets, and called on the industry to move toward greater self-regulation on infrastructure sharing standards rather than waiting for regulatory intervention.

Chief Technology Officer of AFL Networks, Tocs Onyejianya, presented a compelling alternative: an open-access aerial fibre model under which the company builds and operates last-mile infrastructure on existing utility poles and opens it to multiple ISPs on a shared, carrier-grade basis.

He said AFL has already passed over 5,000 homes live across three pilot areas in Lagos, against a planned footprint of 31,000 homes, with a longer-term build target of 1.2 million homes passed across the Eko Electricity Distribution Company franchise area. This is not just infrastructure; it is infrastructure designed for sharing, for efficiency, for reaching more homes with less duplication.

MD/CEO of Wave5 Wireless Limited, Wande Adalemo, extended this thinking with his AMPPS platform, which applies the model of shared electronic payment infrastructure to the broadband sector. By enabling fragmented, single-purpose fibre assets to be unified into shared, multi-tenant infrastructure, Adalemo said the platform aimed to shift the industry from siloed deployment toward host-neutral, more efficiently utilised networks.

The financial realities
MD/CEO of Megamore Wireless Broadband Limited, Amin Dayekh, delivered perhaps the frankest assessment of the financial challenges facing FTTH deployment. He distinguished between fibre as technology and fibre as infrastructure, arguing that an FTTH network’s real test lies in what he termed its ‘second life’, the period after deployment when the network must survive road works, vandalism, power instability and a slow revenue curve before reaching commercial maturity.

His call for patient, infrastructure-minded capital rather than short-cycle return expectations resonated deeply with an audience familiar with the tension between investor demands and the realities of network deployment. Without this patient capital, he warned, Nigeria risks moving from a divide of availability to a divide of affordability, a shift that would leave the most vulnerable communities even further behind.

Path forward
BY the end of the day, despite the challenges, there was a palpable sense of determination in the room. The recommendations adopted by the forum, addressed to the Federal Government, NCC, state governments, operators, and the investment community, represent a comprehensive roadmap for action.
 
From expediting the Wholesale Fixed Broadband Market Assessment to accelerating full operationalisation of the Critical National Information Infrastructure designation, from legislating protective frameworks for telecommunications infrastructure to adopting international outside-plant construction and maintenance standards, the forum produced actionable commitments with clear responsibility.
 
Perhaps most significantly, the participants agreed on the need for collective ownership of the FTTH challenge. As Dr Maida noted in his closing remarks, the path to mass FTTH adoption will not be delivered by the regulator, operators, or government acting alone. It requires shared responsibility across government, operators, infrastructure providers, estate developers and communities.

Is a digital future within reach?
In what appeared to be a collective agreement, the industry acknowledged its challenges openly, proposing solutions honestly, and committing to action collectively. According to them, the fibre optic cables buried beneath Nigeria’s roads and strung between its utility poles are more than mere infrastructure; they are the physical embodiment of the nation’s digital aspirations.

For the millions of Nigerians who have yet to experience true high-speed broadband, for the students who struggle with patchy connectivity for online learning, for the entrepreneurs who cannot access global markets, for the healthcare workers who need to consult specialists in real time, for all of them, the work that began at this forum holds the promise of a more connected, more inclusive future.