Fixed fibre boom driven solely by MTN as rivals stagnate

Nigeria’s fixed broadband market has exploded in the past 13 months, but almost all the growth has come from one company.

According to the latest Nigerian Communications Commission data, total fixed subscribers jumped from 14,053 in January 2025 to 124,590 by February 2026, a 787 percent surge.

MTN Fixed, operating as FibreX, now accounts for 110,564 of those connections, or 88.7 percent of the entire market.

The numbers tell a story of dominance. MTN added more than 95,000 subscribers between its April 2025 rebrand and February 2026, a 639 percent increase for a service that had hovered in the low thousands for years.

Read also: Nigeria’s telephony subscriptions hit 182m as teledensity crosses 84% – NCC

In February alone, it grew 23.6 percent month-on-month, crossing the 100,000 mark for the first time.

The rest of the field barely moved. SWIFTNG entered the fixed category in October 2025 with 17,802 subscribers, peaked at 25,484 in December, then shed customers sharply to 13,945 by February.

Legacy player 21st Century collapsed from 2,259 subscribers in April 2025 to just 81 in February 2026, a 96 percent loss.

Three other established names, ipNX, INQ Digital and Big Picture, show zero subscribers in the fixed-wired table every month. That does not mean they have no customers. NCC reports its fibre and internet subscriptions separately under the ISP category because of their Private Network Link licences and ISP authorisations.

Historical NCC year-end reports confirm ipNX alone held around 14,000–16,000 wired internet subscribers in 2023–2024. The zeros reflect reporting rules, not market absence.

Analysts say MTN’s surge reflects a deliberate strategy to move beyond mobile. The company rebranded its fibre service as FibreX in April 2025 and accelerated household and business roll-outs.

It now aims to connect eight million homes by 2028, a 160-fold increase from current levels.

Egerton Idehen, MTN chief broadband officer, has described the push as a shift toward affordable fibre for more than just high-income areas.

Group executives have spoken of a broader industry move from mobile-only usage to stable home and small-business broadband.

“More digital activity is moving from mobile-only usage to households and small businesses that require stable broadband access,” Ralph Mupita, MTN Group CEO, noted in a recent investor call.

The timing makes sense. Nigeria’s overall broadband penetration reached 53.07 percent by January 2026, up from 45.61 percent a year earlier, but most of that is still mobile. Fixed wired connections remain tiny compared with more than 104 million mobile broadband subscriptions. Yet demand for reliable, high-speed fibre is rising as businesses, remote workers and streaming households seek alternatives to congested mobile networks.

MTN has poured capital into the segment. The operator reported N1 trillion in capital expenditure in 2025, much of it for fibre backhaul and last-mile connections. It also faces real-world headaches: 9,218 fibre cuts in 2025 alone, averaging 25 per day. Vandalism remains a persistent drag on expansion.

Fibre deployment is expensive, vandalism is costly, and most Nigerians still rely on mobile data plans that can be patchy and expensive for heavy use.

Read also: NCC orders telcos to compensate Nigerians for poor network service

New ISP licences issued by the NCC in early 2026, including international names such as Amazon Kuiper, could inject fresh competition.

But for now, MTN is the story. The February 2026 data shows MTN FibreX alone added more fixed subscribers in a single month than the entire market held two years ago.

Unless smaller players find new capital or partnerships, MTN’s near-monopoly in the visible fixed segment looks set to endure, at least until the next wave of ISP entrants scales up.

For Nigeria’s digital economy, fibre is finally taking off, and one operator is driving almost every new connection. The question now is whether that dominance will spur faster nationwide roll-out or slow the entry of meaningful competition. Either way, the wired future has arrived and it wears the MTN logo.