Thursday 02 April, 2026

The NCC just said your bad network owes you airtime. That's new.

On 29 March, the Nigerian Communications Commission issued a directive. Mobile network operators must now compensate subscribers in areas where network quality falls below specified benchmarks. Not in words. In airtime credits, calculated based on your average spending and your location in the affected area.

That's a shift worth pausing on.

The previous model was simple. MTN, Airtel, Glo, or 9mobile gives you bad service. The NCC fines the operator. The fine goes to the regulator. You, the subscriber who couldn't complete a call or lost data mid-transaction, receive nothing. The accountability loop ran between the regulator and the company. The person who actually suffered the bad service wasn't in the loop at all.

The new directive changes who the compensation flows to. The NCC has also directed tower companies, who own the masts and physical infrastructure, to reinvest regulatory fines into network improvements. The money that used to disappear into regulatory accounts is now supposed to produce measurable infrastructure upgrades.

Whether telecoms comply is a real question. The NCC's enforcement history gives mixed signals. It fined operators ₦12.4 billion earlier this year for quality violations and described it as one of its most aggressive enforcement drives in recent memory. That drive didn't change the dropped calls. The directive is a framework. Frameworks need enforcement to become facts.

But the principle is the right one. You're not buying a connection that sometimes works and taking the loss when it doesn't. You're buying a service to a standard. When the standard isn't met in your area, you're owed something. That's what this directive says. In a week where most institutional decisions moved in one direction, this one moved in yours.

The NCC also made clear that this isn't a one-off instruction. It says it will continue to enforce Quality of Service benchmarks and expects operators to invest in network resilience, capacity expansion, and infrastructure upgrades to match growing demand. That's a bigger commitment than a single directive. Whether the regulatory will exists to follow through is what the next six months will show.

Check your airtime balance in the coming weeks. If the directive is enforced, something should arrive. If it isn't, the NCC will have to explain why a commitment it put in writing produced no credits.