MTN Nigeria’s customers who experienced difficulty in making calls and using their data on Wednesday were told by the Telco that the network failure was due to multiple fibre cuts, saying its engineers were working assiduously to restore normal services.
This comes on a day fixed as the deadline for telecom operators to block all lines not linked with National Identification Number (NIN) as directed by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
Coinciding with the deadline, many subscribers who have been unable to make or receive calls on their lines were wondering if their lines had been barred by the network operator.
In another message sent directly to some of its customers, MTN indicated that the service outage affected all the regions of the country. According to the company, the problem started at about 1.39 PM on Wednesday, February 28.
In Nigeria, incidences of fibre cuts have been a major of the perennial poor quality of telecommunications services. This occurs largely during road construction works and in some cases by deliberate acts of vandalism.
According to the figures recently released by the NCC, Nigerian telecom industry spent N14 billion to fix no fewer than 59,000 fibre cuts recorded between 2022 and 2023.
The Commission also revealed that the industry experienced over 35,000 fiber cuts in 2022 and over 24,000 fibre cuts in 2023.
