5G AND CONNECTIVITY GAPS

Services of the 5G for mobile phones are still limited in Nigeria, reckons

SONNY ARAGBA-AKPORE

Nearly five years after the introduction of the fifth generation (5G) technology for mobile telephones in Nigeria, the services are still skeletal and largely limited to parts of the urban centres.

Even at that, not every urban centre has services, and those that have a semblance of services at all, not every area can boast of them. Several reasons can be traced to this. The technology is not cheap to deploy, and so there is a paucity of investment in it, leading to slow and painful decisions to deploy and deliver services by service providers. Apart from the high cost of deployment worsened by high foreign exchange rates, the initial enthusiasm that welcomed the service has waned as the wait for it petered out as a result of the high cost of sign-on fees for acquisition and devices.

Because of very low patronage, operators are not encouraged to devote more resources to growing the networks across the country. But industry regulators, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) says there is a bright future for the service. Admitting the manifest gaps between the urban and rural areas for all network coverage, the NCC says it is more troubling with 5G.

After a thorough examination of what it calls 5G Reality Check and Closing the Gap between Coverage and Usage, the NCC says its examination has been able to explore “how Nigeria’s growing 5G footprint is translating into real user experience, introducing the ‘5G Gap’ between nominal coverage and actual service quality on the ground.”

The Commission says by assessing performance and adoption across the 774 local government areas (LGAs), its report “highlights zones where networks exist but are not yet delivering their full potential.”

“The NCC is using these insights to engage operators on network optimisation, smarter investment planning and performance improvement, ensuring 5G deployment delivers meaningful benefits beyond rollout statistics.  To examine the 5G Gap, the NCC took a cursory look at every Local Government Area in Nigeria to measure a “Deployment Opportunity Score,” which combines Network Performance to determine how fast the downloads and upload speeds really are.

The report lists users’ pains and their struggles with buffering or lag, as the case may be.

Adoption of it is low, thus making the NCC ask rhetorically, “Is the 5G infrastructure actually being used, or is it sitting idle?” It finds that in many areas, the towers are there, but the experience has not caught up with the people. This gap represents a massive opportunity for improvement. The 5G network in Nigeria aims to provide faster internet speeds, lower latency, and enhanced connectivity for various applications, including streaming, gaming, and business operations. The licenses are in the 3.5GHz band, which is considered ideal for 5G deployment, offering a balance between coverage and capacity. In reality, ownership of 5G mobile phones in Nigeria greatly outpaces coverage, leaving many users unconnected to the network, according to a report conducted by Ookla and the NCC.

The “Nigeria Network Performance and 5G Opportunity Analysis” report, released recently, found that 70.9% of 5G-capable devices in Lagos are unable to connect to any 5G network. At the same time, the same goes for 65.6% of 5G devices in Abuja. According to the NCC, the results highlight “significant disparities in network experience across the country,” even in urban areas. That said, the gap is even more pronounced between urban areas where 5G is being deployed and rural areas that remain stuck with 2G and 3G networks. “This imbalance continues to limit digital inclusion and economic opportunity outside the major cities,” the NCC report said. While pledging to accelerate 5G deployment in urban areas, as well as 4G and 5G expansion into underserved rural regions, the regulator also advised telcos to focus investment on improving latency and reducing jitter across all networks “to ensure a high-quality experience for real-time applications. “In terms of operators’ efforts to bridge the gaps, the NCC says it analysed how the four major operators are managing this transition and comes with a summary that states that MTN currently shows the smallest gap, meaning their deployed infrastructure is closely aligned with actual user experience. Airtel shows mid-range performance, indicating that the gap here is often due to a lack of compatible devices in certain areas, not just the network itself. Glo shows a higher gap, indicating that while infrastructure exists, it is not yet consistently translating into sustained high-speed usage for all customers. As for T2 (former 9Mobile), there is high variability showing that in some LGAs, the service is excellent, while in others, the gap is critical, thus limiting user connectivity experience.

The NCC report states areas where user acceptability of 5G is high across the country for each of the four major service providers. T2 services are in Abuja Municipal, Ibeju Lekki, and Oredo, and these have higher user density but significant room to improve consistency. Airtel has presence in Balanga, Doma, and Idemili South, but not in semi-urban areas where adoption is lagging behind potential. Glo is in Ahoada West, Akuku Toru, and Onna Areas, where infrastructure exists but needs optimisation to reach users.  MTN has coverage in Kaduna North, Odogbolu and Bassa. These are high-traffic zones where keeping the gap small requires constant upkeep. What this Means for the future, especially for the consumers, is for operators to do more than just “launch” 5G.

This encourages them to optimise existing towers, fix the “gap” so users feel the speed they were promised. “Target Investment by not just building anywhere—build in the LGAs (like the ones listed above) where people are waiting for better service.” By improving devices, operators should ensure that users in these areas actually have phones capable of connecting to the networks. This encourages them to optimise existing towers, fix the “gap” so users feel the speed they were promised. In 2025, 5G adoption in sub-Saharan region sat below four per cent and expected to reach 16 per cent in 2030, largely due to a concerted effort from industry and government organisations to provide connectivity to citizens” according to GSMA Intelligence, reports, adding “Until now, 5G adoption has been driven by relatively mature markets and consumer use cases like enhanced mobile broadband, but that’s changing. We’re now entering a second wave for 5G that will see the technology engage a diverse set of new markets and audiences.”

The higher portion of the spectrum deployment requires more infrastructure investment to provide the same coverage as the lower one. In a rough perspective, one can say 2 -3 times the amount spent in 2001 is required today to fully put the 5G on equivalent coverage. For instance, regulators of spectrum around the world know this so well. Operators are wooed to use higher spectrum because of the economic benefit derivable, but with the government relaxing the revenue or not collecting it at all. This will allow the operators to divert the funds to roll out instead of revenue to the government. Win-win for operators and citizens. It is not clear whether there are incentives and rules of thumb for the execution of 5G services or if the operators are simply waiting for the right time, tying investments down without any thought for returns.

And as we wait for the services, our sympathies are with the operators because the government has collected the license fees and moved on.

Aragba-Akpore is a member of THISDAY Editorial Board