Insecurity and vandalism have been responsible for slow upgrades of the telecoms in Nigeria, the Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria disclosed on Friday.
ALTON said recurring fibre cuts, vandalism, and security challenges are undermining Nigeria’s telecom modernisation drive, increasing operational costs and constraining service quality gains.
ALTON Chairman, Gbenga Adebayo, said: “There are areas in the country where if you have a fault at 5 pm or 6 pm, you can’t send people to restore services until the next morning.”
The executive said in an interview on Arise TV that such delays intensify network congestion when faults occur, worsening the user experience.
“When you have a problem on the communications highway… it leads to congestion and delays in restoration and downtime,” he said.
President Bola Tinubu has already classified telecom fibre as Critical National Information Infrastructure, making deliberate damage to such assets a punishable offence.
Regulators and security agencies have also stepped up enforcement efforts in recent times.
According to him, repeated disruptions to domestic fibre infrastructure are deepening the divide between international bandwidth routes and Nigeria’s internal networks, affecting both pricing structures and service reliability.
It may be cheaper to buy bandwidth between Canary Wharf and London to Lagos than from Lagos to London,” Adebayo said in a televised interview on Arise TV, attributing the disparity to the cost of maintaining domestic infrastructure.
Adebayo said the recurring damage is not only degrading service reliability but also inflating both restoration and deployment costs for operators already under pressure from rising capital expenditure needs.
Rather than the cost of restoration, the cost of service deployment is also high because of repeated fibre cuts,” he added.
He said the scale of disruption on inland fibre routes remains particularly severe, with operators recording frequent cuts across the national backbone.
“If you have fibre cut as many as 40 times a day across the national network, there is no way that that will not impact the quality of service,” he stated, adding that the Lagos-to-Kano corridor alone averages about 40 cuts daily.
The ALTON chairman also flagged rising incidents of vandalism targeting telecom infrastructure, including theft of power and backup equipment at base stations.
“People are stealing batteries, they are stealing generators… all of these will have an impact on the quality of service,” he said.
The executive warned that operators are also losing assets to what he described as non-state actors, further compounding operational risks.
“We are also exposed to attacks on sites and loss of critical assets to non-state actors,” he said.
Adebayo argued that telecom infrastructure should be treated as critical national infrastructure, comparable to energy assets, given its economic importance.
“Vandalising telecom infrastructure should be treated like vandalising oil pipelines because of the impact on the economy,” he said.
Despite ongoing investments in network expansion and the rollout of hybrid and renewable energy solutions at base stations, he said structural challenges, including insecurity, vandalism, and regulatory bottlenecks, continue to slow progress in improving Nigeria’s digital infrastructure.
