Nigeria’s growing infrastructure lag lays bare the need for urgent action. On current trajectory, Nigeria is unlikely to meet the broadband penetration targets of its National Broadband Plan in 2018. Indeed, it may not meet those targets before 2020 in the absence of market-altering measures.

Nigerian potential and infrastructure requirements remain considerable. For example, data from the Xalam terrestrial fibre dashboards suggests that Nigeria has the largest set of requirements for fibre deployment in Africa. Depending on the selected target baseline, Nigeria would need to deploy between 100,000 km and 200,000 kms of open access fibre to support increased broadband penetration, essentially doubling the existing fibre base.