The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has issued a directive requiring telecom operators to promptly inform consumers of significant service disruptions through media platforms and provide appropriate compensation in line with the Consumer Code of Practice Regulations.
According to a statement by Nnenna Ukoha, Acting Head of Public Affairs at the NCC, consumers must be told the cause of the outage, the affected areas, and an estimated time of restoration. The directive aims to enhance consumer protection, promote transparency, and improve the overall quality of service.
The Commission emphasized that consumers affected by major outages lasting more than 24 hours are entitled to proportional compensation, such as service validity extensions. Mobile network operators, internet service providers, and others delivering last-mile services are all subject to this regulation.
NCC’s Director of Technical Standards and Network Integrity, Edoyemi Ogor, noted that the directive followed months of testing a new reporting portal with service providers. He said the move enforces accountability and ensures that incidents of sabotage, such as vandalism or theft of telecom infrastructure, are tracked and addressed transparently.
Operators are also required to give at least one week’s notice before planned service outages. This aligns with the Executive Order signed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, which designates telecom infrastructure as Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII), underscoring its importance to national security and economic stability.
The NCC has identified three major categories of outages:
- Widespread Service Interruptions: Network issues—such as fibre cuts, vandalism, or access restrictions—that impact five percent or more of an operator’s subscribers or five or more Local Government Areas.
- Site-Based Disruptions: Unplanned outages or loss of network access at 100 or more sites, or at least five percent of the total number of sites (whichever is lower), or a cluster outage lasting 30 minutes or more.
- Degraded Network Quality: Any outage significantly affecting service quality in the top 10 states with the highest network traffic.
All major outages must be reported through the NCC’s publicly accessible Major Outage Reporting Portal available on the Commission’s website. The portal discloses each disruption’s cause, further reinforcing transparency.
This policy reflects the NCC’s ongoing commitment to strengthening consumer rights and ensuring that telecom operators are held to higher service standards.
