Nigerians used 90% of 2025’s internet data in just eight months

In August, Nigerian subscribers pushed 1.76 million terabytes through the country’s networks. That is the biggest month on record since the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the telecoms regulator, began publishing the series in 2023. Spread across 158.5 million active internet subscriptions, it works out at roughly 11 gigabytes each in a single month.

Add up the first eight months of 2026 and the total reaches 11.94 million terabytes. Over the whole of 2025, the country used 13.25 million. By the end of August, then, Nigerians were only a tenth short of last year’s volume, just over 1.3 million terabytes, less than a typical month now. If September looks anything like August, the 2025 record will have fallen before the end of the third quarter; the NCC has not yet published that figure.

The curve is not a straight line. February, a short month, was the low point of the year (1.26 million terabytes), and April dipped slightly from March. Since May, though, every month has beaten the one before. Against August 2025 (1.15 million terabytes), the latest month is up about 53%. In the first half, growth was already 43% year on year, by BusinessDay’s count.

Pricier bundles, undiminished demand

The surge comes even though data costs far more than it did two years ago. On January 20, 2025, the NCC allowed operators to raise tariffs, frozen since 2013, by up to 50%. They had asked for 100%, citing inflation, the weak naira and energy costs. Two months later, BusinessDay found that the average price of a gigabyte across the four operators had risen from ₦287.5 to ₦475, a 65% jump on the old rates. MTN’s 1GB bundle had gone from ₦200 to ₦350.

In the volumes, the price rise is nowhere to be seen. Consumption jumped 36% in 2025, from 9.76 million to 13.25 million terabytes, and is accelerating again in 2026. Households may have switched plans or cut back on other spending; they have not cut back on usage. Aminu Maida, the NCC’s executive vice-chairman, put it his own way, as reported by BusinessDay: “We have crossed a threshold where internet connectivity is no longer a luxury or a secondary utility.”

The usual explanations apply: short videos on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram, WhatsApp calls replacing voice and SMS, mobile banking and payments, remote work, AI tools for students. Osita Odafi, an industry analyst quoted by TechCabal, also points to some 800,000 new internet subscriptions in August. But these are plausible drivers, not measurements: nobody publishes how much each use accounts for. The network itself is changing slowly. In August, 4G made up 54.77% of subscriptions and 5G 4.92%, while 36% were still on 2G.

MTN cashes in, networks strain

The market remains highly concentrated. At the end of August, MTN had 84.56 million internet subscriptions, more than half the total, ahead of Airtel (56.94 million) and Globacom (15.76 million). 9mobile, with 810,010 subscribers, did not add a single customer from July. For the market leader, the boom shows up in the accounts: first-half data revenue reached ₦1.699 trillion, up 38.4%, on traffic growth of 25.8%.

Operators argue that higher prices are what pays for the networks. “Appropriate pricing is what encourages us to make those investments,” Modupe Kadri, chief financial officer of MTN Nigeria, said, according to Vanguard. He also points to vandalism of equipment, which wipes out part of the effort. The shortfall is real: broadband reaches 58.22% of the population, well short of the 70% the national plan targeted for the end of 2025. The country is counting on a 90,000-kilometre open-access fibre build, due to be finished in 2028.

One caveat: a subscription is not a person, and many Nigerians carry two SIM cards. Demand, however, is not about to fall. Since October 1, the NCC has let eligible subscribers reach a list of educational platforms for free, up to 100 megabytes a day. That is more traffic for networks that have been breaking their own records every month since May.