How Nigerians spent ₦20.87 billion daily on data in 2025
This is Follow the Money, our weekly series that unpacks the earnings, business, and scaling strategies of African fintechs and financial institutions. A new edition drops every Monday.
Nothing illustrates Nigeria’s growing dependence on the Internet more than how much people now spend on data. Between 2024 and 2025, national data spending jumped 171.41% to ₦7.62 trillion ($5.58 billion), according to TechCabal’s analysis of Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) consumption data and average data pricing.
The Scale of Spend
Deconstructing Nigeria’s ₦7.62 Trillion annual data bill across four essential dimensions of time.
| Timeframe | Naira (₦) | Dollars ($) |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | ₦20.87 Bn | $15.28 M |
| Weekly | ₦146.51 Bn | $107.24 M |
| Monthly | ₦634.88 Bn | $464.71 M |
Every time a Nigerian streams a football match, joins an online prayer meeting, scrolls Instagram, or binge-watches Nollywood on YouTube, money is moving from their wallets to telecom balance sheets. While this behavioural shift has become a core revenue engine for telcos, it has also intensified consumer frustration over rising costs and unreliable service.
With video streaming alone consuming up to 1GB per hour in HD, expanding digital habits, combined with tariff hikes, pushed Nigeria’s annual data consumption up 35.70% to 13.25 million terabytes (13.25 billion GB) in 2025. This lifted average per-user usage to 89.42GB, up from 70.09GB a year earlier.
Nigeria Data Pulse
Compare your 2024 vs 2025 connectivity costs.
| Timeline | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly | ₦0 | ₦0 |
| Monthly | ₦0 | ₦0 |
| Yearly | ₦0 | ₦0 |
*Provider rates based on 2024/2025 1GB price points. Dollar conversions indexed at period-average rates.
The maths
By TechCabal’s calculations, Nigeria’s annual Internet spend hit ₦7.62 trillion ($5.58 billion) in 2025, based on an average data price of ₦575 per GB ($0.42). In 2024, the figure stood at ₦2.81 trillion ($2.06 billion), when 1GB averaged ₦287.5 ($0.21).
This calculation was an assessment of the average cost of 1GB nationwide, using prices from telcos’ websites.
Winners
Telecom operators are the biggest financial winners, with data revenue becoming their largest contributor to overall revenue.
The Billions Behind the Megabytes
Mapping the transition of Nigeria’s telco giants into data-first utilities.
MTN Nigeria
MTN’s data revenue rose by 379.63% since 2020, now accounting for 52.99% of total earnings.
Streaming platforms like YouTube are the second major beneficiaries.
Aside from being the default streaming platform of choice for religious leaders and the content monetisation engine for content creators, YouTube is quickly becoming the home for Nollywood movies as cinema economics continue to rise.
As subscribers spend more on data, they are feeding platforms monetisation that depends on higher engagement time to show advertisements to users.
This growth has pushed Nigeria above the regional average for internet usage, with around 29% of the population using it. 85% of Nigerians on the mobile internet use it to make or receive video calls, 75% use it to watch free-to-access online videos, and 54% use it to stream free music, according to GSMA.
The hidden cost for subscribers
For users, rising data spend has not translated into reliability.
Internet downtime has become routine, often defining whether a workday is productive or wasted.
“Last December, the network got so bad I could not join most of my meetings,” said Precious Sebiomo, a lawyer based in Lagos. “I lost workdays to network failure.”
When the internet fails, livelihoods suffer.
In 2024, a major outage on MTN Nigeria left customers unable to make calls or connect to the internet. The outage, which lasted four hours, was caused by multiple fibre cuts.
Between January and August 2025, telecom operators recorded over 19,000 fibre cuts, triggering prolonged outages and service disruptions.
In 2025, MTN had 1002 major outages. T2 Mobile (formerly 9mobile) had 632. Airtel had 248, and Glo had 124.
These major outages often result in the complete shutdown of critical services such as SMS, voice calls, mobile data, and USSD, sometimes lasting for hours, leaving millions digitally stranded.
Beyond outages, Nigerians face slow speeds. The country was ranked 85th globally for mobile speeds and 129th for fixed broadband speeds in December 2025, according to Speedtest Intelligence by Ookla Research, a global data insight company.
Average speeds on mobile were 44.14 Mbps, and fixed broadband were 33.32 Mbps. In a global digital economy, this places Nigerians at a structural disadvantage, competing internationally with slower, less reliable infrastructure.
According to Adeolu Ogunbanjo, president of the National Association of Telecoms Subscribers (NATCOMS), a consumer-focused industry body, only improved service quality will justify the price hike of 2025.
“Nigerians are still complaining because the poor services have persisted,” he said.
However, telcos argue that the telecom sector has been hampered by years of underinvestment, largely because they could not afford to.
“The price increase, which was highly needed for the survival and continued growth of the industry, will enable us to continue investing in network infrastructure, expanding coverage, and delivering improved products and services that meet the evolving needs of our customers,” Airtel Nigeria’s CEO Dinesh Balsingh said in a statement in January 2025.
With pricing review already implemented, telcos are spending more on network infrastructure. MTN Nigeria has more than tripled its capital expenditure to ₦757.4 billion ($554.38 million) as of October 2025.
Telcos note that it will take time for results to show, but the patience of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is beginning to wane.
In January 2026, Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, directed the regulator to impose automatic penalties on operators for network failures within 90 days.
The regulator also plans to impose penalties of at least ₦12.4 billion ($9.08 million) on operators for service breaches in 2026, as it prioritises quality service delivery within the year.
Nigeria’s data economy is now worth at least ₦7.62 trillion ($5.58 billion), according to TechCabal’s analysis of NCC consumption data and average data pricing. For telcos, this is a guaranteed growth engine. For platforms and content creators, this is a subscriber goldmine.
For Nigerians, this is a structural dependency that is growing more expensive, but not more reliable. If network quality does not improve, subscribers may eventually start looking beyond terrestrial networks and toward satellite connectivity for stability in a country that increasingly runs on data.
You May Also Like
Experts: Rising oil prices may dampen expectations of a decline in US inflation, posing a challenge to the Federal Reserve.
Lovable AI’s Astonishing Rise: Anton Osika Reveals Startup Secrets at Bitcoin World Disrupt 2025
