You have been promised cheaper internet before. Every few years a new national broadband plan arrives with a number attached to it, and every few years your bandwidth invoice climbs anyway. So when the federal government announced on 8 August that it had finally incorporated Bridge Open Access — the company that will build 90,000 kilometres of fibre across Nigeria — the reasonable response was not excitement. It was: show me the paperwork.
So we did that. We read the World Bank's approval of the BRIDGE project, the African Development Bank's April board approval, and the Federal Ministry of Communications' own project page, side by side. Every one of them is an official document. None of them describes quite the same network, the same price, or the same number of jobs. That gap is not a scandal — big infrastructure numbers move as designs firm up. But it tells you a great deal about how much of this is still being decided, and it is the most useful thing a Nigerian business owner can know right now.
A company that arrived a year after its own deadline
Start with what actually changed. Bridge OA is the special purpose vehicle that will own and deliver Project BRIDGE — Building Resilient Digital Infrastructure for Growth. Until this month it did not legally exist. Development finance institutions had pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to a company that had never been registered, which meant contracts had no counterparty and investors had nothing to buy into. Incorporation fixes that, and it is why this announcement carries weight the previous ones did not.
It is also late. The ministry's own project page still carries an FAQ stating that the SPV would be incorporated in Q3 2025. It was incorporated in August 2026 — roughly a year behind the government's published timeline, on a programme whose completion deadline has not moved. Minister Bosun Tijani framed the registration as the platform needed to complete strategic investor onboarding and position Nigeria as a regional connectivity hub for West Africa.
Three official documents, three different networks
Here is where the paperwork stops agreeing. On the same project:
- The World Bank, approving $500 million in October 2025, put total project cost at $1.6 billion and described extending the national backbone from 35,000km to 125,000km, connecting 38,800 public schools, 16,900 health facilities and 3,400 LGA offices.
- The African Development Bank, approving $200 million in April 2026, put total financing at $2 billion and described extending the backbone from 30,000km to 120,000km, with up to 2.8 million jobs over the project's lifecycle.
- The ministry's project page also uses $2 billion, but counts jobs very differently: 20,000 direct and over 150,000 indirect — roughly one-sixteenth of the AfDB's figure.
The financing gap has been explained. Project lead Jumoke Akande told TechCabal that the $2 billion was a rounded preliminary estimate, while $1.6 billion is the envelope formally appraised by the World Bank. The 5,000km discrepancy in the backbone baseline and the wildly different job counts have not been explained anywhere we could find.
Who is actually putting up the money
The concessional layer is real and largely locked. Sovereign financing totals $800 million: $500 million from the World Bank through IDA, $200 million from the AfDB, and $100 million from the EBRD. On top of that sits a €22 million European Union grant and a $2.6 million project preparation grant from the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance.
What is not locked is the larger half. The AfDB expects at least $1.2 billion from private investors, who are to hold between 51 and 75 percent of Bridge OA while the federal government keeps a minority stake of 25 to 49 percent. Thirty companies have registered interest. None has signed. The next phase of Project BRIDGE is a fundraising exercise before it is a construction project, and the World Bank has rated the programme's overall risk as substantial, citing governance, procurement and institutional capacity alongside inflation and exchange-rate volatility.
Why "open access" is the part that touches your bill
Bridge OA is not allowed to sell you internet. It is a wholesale company, mandated to sell capacity to every operator on equal terms — and that constraint is the whole point.
Think about it as an economics problem rather than a policy one. Today, if a provider wants to serve your office in Osogbo or Yola, it must either build its own long-distance trunk route or rent from a competitor who did. Both are expensive enough that most simply do not go. A shared backbone removes that barrier for everyone at once. The project's results framework targets a 17 percent fall in wholesale bandwidth prices and fixed broadband speeds of 50 Mbps by 2030. Wholesale is what your ISP buys before it sells to you; it is the largest single input in the number on your invoice.
Worth noting: the AfDB's paperwork sets a goal of lifting broadband penetration from 45 percent to around 70 percent. The NCC's own monthly data already puts penetration at 55.67 percent, on 120.7 million broadband subscribers. The baseline in the loan document was stale before the loan was signed.
The last mile is where Nigerian fibre promises go to die
Nigeria already has tens of thousands of kilometres of backbone. It has not turned into fixed broadband for ordinary businesses, and the numbers explain why.
NCC Executive Vice-Chairman Aminu Maida told an industry forum this year that Nigeria has roughly 265,000 active fibre-to-the-home connections — for a country of more than 200 million people. Between 80 and 85 percent of that deployment sits in Lagos, Rivers and the FCT. MTN's FibreX service illustrates the concentration precisely: of its 232 locations nationwide, Lagos, Abuja and Rivers account for 77.6 percent.
The bottleneck is right of way. The National Economic Council's harmonised rate is ₦145 per linear metre, and progress is real but partial: 13 states have waived charges entirely and 16 more have adopted the ₦145 rate. That still leaves a patchwork. Olayinka Amoo, a telecom site acquisition specialist, told Technext that operators frequently end up paying more than ₦145 once you account for what he called official processes and backdoor processes — negotiated not per plot, as with towers, but per metre, across hundreds of kilometres.
Then there is damage. The regulator's figures: operators recorded over 27,000 fibre cuts in 2025, with MTN Nigeria alone suffering 9,218 — more than 25 a day. In the first half of 2026, Maida reported over 5,000 cuts caused by road construction and excavation alone. "Our interests are aligned," he said. "What has too often been missing is a dependable system of early coordination." One point of caution for anyone reading around this story: a widely circulated figure of 155,397 cuts in April and May 2026 alone would imply a rate roughly thirty times the NCC's own annual count, and we could not reconcile it with the regulator's published data. We have used the NCC's numbers.
Nigeria is exporting a backbone it has not built
The oddest development of the month: while Bridge OA was being registered, Tijani was in Ouagadougou agreeing with Burkinabè minister Aminata Zerbo-Sabané to extend Project BRIDGE into Burkina Faso, modelling routes through Niger and Benin with the aim of cutting Burkinabè connectivity costs by nearly half.
The strategic logic is real — cross-border transit revenue is exactly how a wholesale backbone becomes commercially viable, and Tijani's stated objective is to position Nigeria as a digital gateway to West Africa and the Sahel. But Technext put the obvious objection bluntly: Nigeria is marketing a network that has not yet had a single kilometre laid at home. On timing, the minister told reporters after meeting President Tinubu that Nigerians would see fibre going into the ground “in a few weeks.” Project documents reported by TechCabal have physical deployment beginning in 2027, after investor selection, financial close, route surveys and permits. Those two statements cannot both be right.
What to do before the first kilometre goes down
Nothing about your connectivity changes this quarter. The planning window, though, is open now.
If you are negotiating bandwidth contracts, avoid long lock-ins at today's pricing that run past 2028 — the wholesale floor is designed to move, and you do not want to be the customer who pre-paid for it. If connectivity economics have been killing your business case for a branch or warehouse in a secondary city, rebuild that model on 2029 assumptions and see whether it clears. And regardless of what Bridge OA delivers, keep your redundancy honest: in a country logging 25 fibre cuts a day at a single operator, a second independent link and a tested continuity plan remain cheaper than a day of downtime.
The kilometres were always the easy part of this story. The hard part is whether the capacity gets lit, protected, and priced in a way you ever actually feel.
If wholesale bandwidth really did fall 17 percent by 2030, what is the first thing you would build or expand that you cannot justify today?
Originally featured on African Development Bank Group
