NCC Blames Inadequate Networks’ Capacity for Poor Services in Major Cities

Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has said inadequate capacity across the networks to support heavy usage in high-density urban areas is the cause for the poor quality of telecom service being experienced in Lagos, Abuja and other major cities in Nigeria.

The Commission stated this in a document while highlighting the results of its research findings on the networks in partnership with Ookla, a broadband intelligence firm.

NCC noted with a specific focus on data experience, that the high density of active internet users in urban areas contributes to the issue of dropped video calls, buffering on streams, failed mobile payments, and slow downloads.

According to the Commission “Overall, network capacity for data services across the country appears good. However, capacity issues have been observed in urban areas across all major operators.”

“Capacity restrictions are concentrated in urban zones, the impact on rural service is extremely low, reinforcing that this constraint is a localizlsed issue tied to high-density areas,” the telecom regulator added.

While calling for more targeted investments by the telecom operators, NCC said the most effective strategy to relieve capacity strain in cities is a multi-faceted approach focusing on two goals, which include “aggressively deploying 5G technology and optimizing the capacity of the existing 4G (LTE) network to improve performance for all users.”

“While the National Proportion shows a minimal overall impact across the country, the issue is intensified in high-density urban areas.

“This localised congestion leads directly to peak-hour performance degradation, confirming that targeted infrastructure investment in these urban zones is most critical to ensure consistent service quality,” it stated.