Yemisi Izuora
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has issued licenses to seven new Internet Service Providers (ISPs), pushing the total number of authorised ISPs in the country from 224 in December 2025 to 231.
Each of the new operators has been granted a five-year licence, running from January 1, 2026, to December 31, 2030, according to updated data from the regulator.
Most of the new entrants are clustered where business activity is highest. Five are based in Lagos, while Abuja and Imo State picked up one each.
The newly licensees include Amazon Kuiper Nigeria Limited, Boost ISP, Dasol Solutions Services, Fibre Sonic, Intellivision Technologies, Wetom Technologies, and Granet Technologies — another reminder of how Lagos and the FCT continue to dominate Nigeria’s broadband landscape.
This is engendering more competition at a time when telecom operators are battling hard for users.
Nigeria had 144.7 million Internet subscribers as of November 2025, with data consumption hitting a record 1.236 million terabytes in that month alone. As more ISPs enter the scene, expectations around service quality, pricing, and reliability are likely to rise.
The ISPs still play a relatively small role in Nigeria’s connectivity story. While players like Spectranet, Starlink, FibreOne, Tizeti, and ipNX dominate the fixed and satellite ISP space, they collectively serve just a fraction of users.
As of Q2 2025, the top three ISPs accounted for about 65 per cent of the roughly 314,000 active ISP subscribers nationwide, tiny when compared to mobile broadband.
That context is key. Nigeria’s four mobile network operators — MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and 9mobile still account for 99.5 per cent of all Internet subscribers. Even so, the NCC’s continued licensing push, including recent approvals for satellite providers like Amazon’s Project Kuiper, signals a long-term bet on diversifying how Nigerians get online, especially as demand for faster and more reliable connectivity keeps growing.