Fibre is changing Nigeria’s Internet. The hard part is getting everyone connected

Nigeria's fixed broadband median download speed rose 155% — from 13.50 Mbps in 2023 to 34.47 Mbps in the first half of 2026 — according to Ookla data cited by TechCabal. Upload speeds nearly doubled to 25.17 Mbps, and latency dropped from 47.9 milliseconds to 35.8 milliseconds over the same period.

The gains are most pronounced at the bottom of the market. Per TechCabal, users with the slowest connections — the bottom 10% — saw download speeds climb from 2.24 Mbps to 6.04 Mbps, while those with the fastest connections improved from 74.37 Mbps to 90.04 Mbps. The larger proportional jump at the low end reflects the core dynamic: Nigeria is raising its broadband floor, not just its ceiling. Karim Yaici, lead industry analyst at Ookla covering the Middle East and Africa, told TechCabal that growth across Africa is being driven mainly by people moving off older, slower connections onto fibre plans offering 30–50 Mbps or more.

Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) subscriber numbers tell the same story. TechCabal reports that FTTP connections rose from 84,141 in Q4 2025 to 265,000 by June 2026 — more than tripling in roughly six months, per Ookla. Fibre has also overtaken Fixed Wireless Access to become Nigeria's largest fixed broadband technology for the first time. Mukesh Chandra, former chief technology officer at Globacom and a telecom infrastructure consultant, told TechCabal that fibre is now the essential backbone for carrying heavy data traffic that wireless and mobile access networks cannot handle on their own.

The next phase will be harder. TechCabal outlines two distinct challenges: expanding the number of households on fibre (an infrastructure problem) and persuading existing fibre users to pay for higher-tier plans (an economic one). Yaici also noted that operators have a commercial incentive to hold back speeds — giving every customer the fastest connection immediately reduces the room to upsell more expensive plans later. Meanwhile, Chandra told TechCabal that building national and international long-distance fibre networks requires heavy investment in fibre and optical transport infrastructure, making it impossible for most ISPs to build their own backbone. That concentrates large-network ownership among a handful of operators and makes infrastructure sharing critical.

Affordability and rural reach compound the supply-side constraints. Yaici pointed to Ghana as a cautionary comparison: the country had 261,938 fibre subscribers in Q4 2025, up 18.4% year-on-year, yet fibre reached less than 0.8% of the population, with coverage concentrated in cities, according to TechCabal. Nigeria could follow a similar pattern if network expansion outpaces household incomes. Yaici told TechCabal that weekly and prepaid pricing models could help customers who cannot manage traditional monthly bills, and that the harder job is convincing people of fibre's value, not just deploying the cable.

For rural areas specifically, full fibre-to-the-home may not be the answer. Olajide Mafolabomi, CEO of UCard Innovations and a non-executive director at Telserve Networks, told TechCabal that fibre can serve as the backbone reaching rural communities while 4G, 5G, or fixed wireless handles the last mile to individual homes. Nigeria's Wholesale Fixed Broadband Market Assessment aims to encourage open-access infrastructure sharing and has pushed states to reduce right-of-way fees. Whether operators can make that model work commercially and technically is, per Yaici, still an open question.

Chandra also told TechCabal that Nigeria needs a resilient national fibre backbone linking major cities through multiple routes, so that a single cable cut does not disrupt large parts of the country. The TechCabal analysis frames the path forward around three variables: affordability, geographic coverage beyond major cities, and avoiding excessive concentration of infrastructure ownership — with the broadband floor still needing to rise considerably before most Nigerians experience reliable everyday connectivity.