Subscribers may have continued to ration data usage as evidenced in the new statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
April subscription statistics by the NCC showed that from attaining the 1,000,930.60 terabytes of data consumption as of the beginning of the year, it dropped to 893,054.80 terabytes in February, went up to 995,876.10 in March and fell to 983,283.43 as of the end of last month, reports The Guardian.
Further analysis of the statistics showed that mobile Internet subscriptions declined marginally by 0.12 per cent to 141.99 million in April 2025, down from 142.16 million in January.
Broadband penetration, however, continued to grow, rising by 0.42 per cent from 47.73 per cent in March to 48.15 per cent in the month under review.
Though mobile network operators (MNOs), in their recently released financial report, claimed that the 50 per cent tariff hike approved in January by the Federal Government, was impacting their bottom line, positively, continued drop in usage since implementation of the hike showed that many subscribers, especially those who surfed the web via the narrowband (GSM) had dropped, leaving usage to broadband users, especially Fibre To The House (FTTH) segment.
Recall that the 50 per cent hike raised the price of calls from N6.40 to N9.60 per minute, SMS from N4 to N6, and 1GB of data from N287.50 to N431.25, which has defeated the N360/GB target set for realisation by the end of 2025 as enshrined in the National Broadband Plan (NBP) 2020-2025.
Meanwhile, leap in broadband penetration by 0.42 per cent showed that there was a total of 104.3 million broadband connections in the country as of April.
With penetration hitting 48.15 per cent, it showed that Nigeria was 21.85 per cent short of the 70 per cent target as documented by the NBP 2020 to 2025.
The NBP timelines expected the country’s broadband penetration to have hit 50 per cent as of the end of 2023. However, at the end of the year, penetration stood at 43.71 per cent and rose marginally to 44.43 per cent at the end of 2024.
Legacy challenges, among others, have been blamed for the slow pace of development, especially the NBP timelines implementation.
