FG’s enforcement of infrastructure law critical to telecoms growth — Airtel

Airtel Nigeria has disclosed that protecting telecommunications network infrastructure is crucial to the sector’s sustained growth.

This is as the telco urged the Federal Government to enforce the Critical Network Infrastructure Act to protect the sector’s critical infrastructure. Harmanpreet Dhillon, Chief Technology Officer, Airtel Nigeria, said at a media roundtable, “Seventy percent of fibre cuts happen due to ongoing construction or vandalisation, so the CNI is going to help us. We are requesting that the government ensure its enforcement of the CNI Act,”

The sector lost $23 million to fibre cuts in 2023. According to a presentation at a recent Nigerian Communications Commission event, Nigeria experiences over 1,600 fibre cuts and more than 500 network outages each month, affecting the network service of over 83 million users annually.

The CTO noted that many construction works are ongoing in the South-South and North regions, jeopardising network connections. “So, with CNI, our regulatory teams are also writing to the construction companies that the CNI Act is there, and we need to enforce it so that they can tell well in advance that we are going to carry out the construction work here, and we can relocate it or we can have a protection already in place for it,” he stated.

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The Federal Government signed the ‘Designation and Protection of Critical National Information Infrastructure Order, 2024’ in August 2024.

The law makes it an offence to purposefully damage assets such as telco towers/sites, switch stations, data centres, satellite infrastructure, submarine and fibre optic cables, transmission equipment, e-government platforms, and databases, among many others.

Bosun Tijani, minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, said, “The security and protection of these Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII) is a priority for this administration and will help improve the quality of telecoms services, which has very often been affected by disruption and intentional damage,”

According to Dhillon, earlier quoted, enforcing the CNI Act will protect telcos and allow them to offer 100 percent service assurance to their customers. “The CNI is going to help us. We are already requesting the government to ensure the enforcement of the CNI Act,” he emphasised.