Nigeria’s biggest cities are sitting on a paradox. Millions of Nigerians now own smartphones capable of running 5G, yet most of those same phones cannot find a 5G signal to connect to, even in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt, the country’s three busiest telecom markets.
Fresh figures from the Nigerian Communications Commission paint a picture of a rollout that has fallen badly behind consumer demand. In its Network Performance and 5G Opportunity Analysis, developed with global internet analytics firm Ookla, the regulator found that Lagos alone has 41,057 5G capable devices that cannot latch onto any 5G network.
Abuja follows with 16,143 such devices. Altogether, more than 57,000 5G ready phones across the two cities are functionally stuck on slower networks despite the hardware in users’ pockets being fully capable of high speed connectivity.
The numbers translate into a coverage gap of 70.9 percent in Lagos and 65.6 percent in Abuja, according to the NCC report. In plain terms, roughly seven out of every ten people who bought a 5G capable smartphone in either city still cannot get a 5G connection when they need one. When the signal drops, phones simply fall back to 4G or 3G, and users are left paying premium prices for devices that rarely deliver the speeds they were built for.
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Port Harcourt, the third city typically grouped with Lagos and Abuja as one of Nigeria’s tier one 5G markets, tells a similar story. Industry analysts describe coverage across all three cities as concentrated in pockets rather than blanket availability, meaning a resident can walk a few streets in the same city and lose 5G entirely. Beyond these three metros, the picture worsens sharply. Outside Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and Kano, 5G is described by telecom experts as virtually nonexistent, with large parts of the country still leaning entirely on 2G and 3G infrastructure.
The disconnect stems from a simple supply and demand mismatch. Nigerians, like much of Africa, have been buying 5G ready devices at a faster pace than telecom operators have been building out the towers and spectrum capacity to serve them.
Affordable 5G handsets from brands such as Xiaomi and Samsung have pushed adoption of the hardware upward, but network investment has not kept pace. According to recent industry data, 5G still holds only a small single digit share of Nigeria’s mobile network, with 4G continuing to dominate the market.
Nigeria’s 5G story began in September 2022, when MTN switched on the country’s first commercial 5G network in Lagos, with plans to extend to Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Kano, Owerri and Maiduguri. Airtel followed in mid-2023 with its own rollout across Lagos, Ogun, Rivers State and Abuja.
Mafab Communications, the third operator awarded a 5G licence, has yet to launch a meaningful commercial service years after paying for its spectrum. Four years on from that first switch-on, the coverage gap the NCC is now reporting shows just how much ground operators still have to cover.
The commission has pushed back on the industry, insisting that operators must close the gap in exactly the cities where demand is highest, while also extending 4G and 5G coverage into underserved rural regions. It has pointed to internet speeds in underserved areas running as much as 50 percent lower than in major cities as evidence of a widening digital divide.
Proposed fixes include phasing out older 2G and 3G networks to free up spectrum for 5G, encouraging tower sharing among operators, and channelling more investment into public private partnerships that prioritise high demand urban clusters.
There is an upside buried in the numbers. Tens of thousands of 5G ready devices sitting idle in Lagos and Abuja alone represent a market operators have barely tapped.
Analysts argue that closing the coverage gap in these three cities first, rather than spreading investment thin nationwide, could unlock faster returns while also proving out the business case for expanding 5G into Nigeria’s smaller cities and rural communities.
Whether operators move quickly enough to capture that opportunity, or whether millions of capable devices keep falling back to yesterday’s networks, will shape how fast Nigeria’s digital economy can actually grow.
