Enextgen Wireless has raised strong concerns over the recently announced partnership between the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and global speed-test company, Ookla, warning that the initiative may fall short of delivering the network-quality improvements Nigerian consumers urgently need.
Instead, the company argues, the arrangement risks benefiting mobile network operators (MNOs) far more than the public, contrary to NCC’s mandate of ensuring high quality of service nationwide.
In a technical assessment (report) sighted by Techeconomy, Enextgen Wireless said the NCC–Ookla collaboration relies heavily on crowd-sourced data, which, while useful, does not provide the level of diagnostic insight required to uncover persistent coverage gaps, high connection-drop rates, and severe latency issues plaguing users across the country.
Crowd-Sourced Data Helps MNOs, Not Consumers
Enextgen notes that Ookla’s reporting “serves a purpose, mostly for helping MNOs,” but does not expose the root causes of poor quality of experience for everyday users.
Their argument is based on years of independent measurements from their EMETRICS platform, which uses controlled testing to evaluate real-world network performance across Nigeria.
According to the company, crowd-sourced data often masks serious quality-of-service failures.
For instance, Enextgen’s measurements at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport show connection drop rates of 33–63% on MTN’s 4G network, figures that do not appear in coverage maps derived from crowd-sourced samples.
Similarly, MTN’s 3G network showed drop-call rates as high as 46%, with round-trip latency exceeding 900ms, making basic connectivity unreliable even where signal bars appear strong.
“These realities do not surface in NCC’s new system,” Engineer Aderemi Adeyeye, CEO of Enextgen argued, noting that the NCC’s published coverage map “does not show the high rate of connection drops” or the recurring handovers to lower-quality 3G networks, which substantially degrade user experience.
“Nigerian MNOs Do Not Prioritise Basic Coverage Quality”
Enextgen Wireless expressed concern that the NCC’s current approach could allow mobile operators to maintain broad coverage claims while ignoring fundamental radio-network optimisation, such as proper signal quality, interference management, or improved success rates for internet access.
“Our experience is that Nigerian MNOs do not care that much about the basic quality of their coverage signal,” he stated. “Connection drop rates and low internet access success rates are prevalent and avoidable, yet the necessary actions for maintaining high-quality radio networks are not receiving adequate attention.”
A Better Approach to Protect Consumers
Enextgen maintains that if the NCC truly intends to uphold its mandate of ensuring high-quality mobile networks, the Commission must adopt more rigorous, controlled-measurement tools capable of identifying, and forcing operators to fix, coverage and quality gaps.
“For NCC to meet its self-proclaimed mandate of maintaining high mobile network quality, it needs our platform/service or an equivalent,” he said, pointing to its EMETRICS system, which has been in operation since 2019.
The company warns that without such actionable, engineering-grade analytics, the NCC–Ookla partnership may generate attractive dashboards and broad coverage statistics, but fail to address the real-world pain points, call drops, slow browsing, poor video streaming, and unreliable 4G/5G transitions, experienced daily by millions of Nigerians.
Bottom Line
Enextgen Wireless insists that only diagnostic, engineering-level assessments, not broad crowd-sourced averages, can help Nigeria close its chronic quality-of-service gaps.
Until then, the company argues, NCC’s new reporting system may provide more value to operators, who can point to improved superficial metrics, than to the consumers whose connectivity frustrations remain unresolved.
