Nigeria’s planned 90,000-kilometre national fibre network may expand the country’s digital backbone, but stakeholders are increasingly confronting a harder question: how to turn the infrastructure into meaningful connectivity for millions of Nigerians still offline.
More than 23 million Nigerians remain without meaningful connectivity, according to industry estimates.
The scale of the gap is even larger under the Federal Government’s Project BRIDGE assessment, which has identified more than 33 million Nigerians as offline. Bosun Tijani, minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy has separately said Nigeria is seeking to connect about 40 million people without internet access.
The varying estimates point to a broader problem: Nigeria’s connectivity challenge is no longer simply about laying fibre. It is about getting networks, devices, electricity, affordability and digital services to people in communities that remain commercially difficult to serve.
Tijani reinforced that distinction at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
‘What we do not have is meaningful connectivity, the sort of connectivity that you truly need to be able to benefit from the sort of innovation that we’re seeing,’ he said.
His comment comes as the Federal Government accelerates Project BRIDGE, a $2 billion programme that will deploy 90,000 kilometres of fibre and expand Nigeria’s national backbone to more than 120,000 kilometres.
The government now expects the project, initially planned for five years, to be completed within three years. Tijani said the fibre network is central to Nigeria’s plan to reach people without internet access.
Fibre is only the first layer
The challenge facing Nigeria is that a national fibre backbone does not automatically put an internet connection into a rural household.
Project BRIDGE is expected to provide open-access infrastructure that telecom operators and internet service providers can use to extend their networks. But additional investment will still be required to connect communities and end users.
This is why the Federal Government is pursuing other connectivity programmes alongside BRIDGE.
The Nigeria Universal Communication Access Project is designed to deploy about 3,700 telecommunications sites in underserved and unserved communities. Tijani said at least 200 of the sites are expected to be active before December, with each tower serving communities of between 5,000 and 10,000 people.
The government is also looking to satellite connectivity for locations where fibre and terrestrial towers cannot reach.
The combination of fibre, towers and satellite infrastructure suggests that closing Nigeria’s connectivity gap will require several technologies rather than a single nationwide network.
Quality remains a problem
The urgency is also reflected in the quality of existing connections. NCC industry statistics show that 2G still accounted for 36.54 percent of mobile-generation market share in July 2026, even as 4G and 5G adoption increases in urban areas.
This highlights the difference between being technically covered by a mobile network and having the kind of high-capacity connection needed for modern digital services.
For rural communities, the barriers extend beyond network infrastructure. Weak electricity supply, low purchasing power, limited access to smartphones and the cost of deploying and maintaining networks can all affect whether connectivity becomes commercially viable.
That means the success of Project BRIDGE cannot ultimately be measured only in kilometres of fibre laid. Its bigger test will be how many additional Nigerians gain reliable, affordable and useful access to the internet.
The Rural Connectivity Summit 2.0 is expected to focus precisely on that gap as Nigeria moves from building its digital backbone to connecting the people who have yet to benefit from it.