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Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL), was a monopoly telephone service provider in
Nigeria Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...
until 1992 when the
Nigerian government The federal government of Nigeria is composed of three distinct branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial, whose powers are vested and bestowed upon by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. One of the primary f ...
enacted the Nigerian Communications Commission act allowing new entrants into the telecommunications sector. During and after its years of monopoly, the performance of the firm was sub-par, a behavior similar to other state owned enterprises such as
NEPA The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is a United States environmental law designed to promote the enhancement of the environment. It created new laws requiring List of federal agencies in the United States, U.S. federal government agenc ...
and government-owned water corporations. The firm was formed in 1985 as the welding together of two government entities, the telecoms arm of the Post and Telecommunications (P&T) department under the Ministry of Communications and the Nigerian External Communications (NET). A February 2008 report by the
BBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
revealed that the Nigerian government assumed the transnational corporation did not improve performance of NITEL and therefore stopped privatization in favour of Transcorp. In 2015, the government eventually finalized a transaction that saw NITEL and Mtel's assets handed over to NATCOM. The deal was valued at $252 million. In November 2017, Nitel appointed Nate James as vice president of account management.


History


Post and Telecommunications Department (P&T)

During colonial rule and until 1985, the Post and Telecommunications department provided
mail The mail or post is a system for physically transporting postcards, letter (message), letters, and parcel (package), parcels. A postal service can be private or public, though many governments place restrictions on private systems. Since the mid ...
ing and internal telecommunication services between Nigerian cities while NET provided telecommunications services between selected Nigerian cities and foreign countries. Due to resource constraints, provision of services were planned in phases with expansion more pronounced between the 1950s and 1970s. Telegraph services began in the 1880s and was initially managed by the Public Works Department until 1907 when those services were transferred to P & T. In 1908, a manual telephone exchange with a magneto switchboard of 100 lines was introduced in
Lagos Lagos ( ; ), or Lagos City, is a large metropolitan city in southwestern Nigeria. With an upper population estimated above 21 million dwellers, it is the largest city in Nigeria, the most populous urban area on the African continent, and on ...
and by 1920 the estimate of telephone lines in the country was 920, at 920. A year later, a multiple switchboard was introduced with a capacity for 800 lines and in 1941 a point to point connection with a
teleprinter A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point (telecommunications), point-to-point and point- ...
was introduced. In the 1950s, planned investments were launched that included expanding automatic telephone exchanges and trunk circuits, launching a Lagos to Port Harcourt microwave radio transmission route and introducing V.H.F. multi-channel radio transmission to more cities and towns. In 1961, they were more than 32,000 telephones line and 120 telephone exchanges. Investments in telecommunications moved the subscriber base to over 100,000 by 1973 and up to 400,000 by 1990.


Nigerian External Telecommunications

The history of NET can be traced to
colonial rule Colonialism is the control of another territory, natural resources and people by a foreign group. Colonizers control the political and tribal power of the colonised territory. While frequently an imperialist project, colonialism can also take ...
towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1886, a telegraph service between Lagos and London was provided by African Direct Telegraph Company, this company later became Imperial and International Communications after a merger and then Cable and Wireless. Upon independence, the government of Nigerian decided to go into a partnership with Cable and Wireless, acquiring interest in the Nigerian arm of Cable and Wireless, and renaming the company Nigerian External Telecommunications. The new firm provided international telephone, telex and telegraph services, high speed data transmission and transmission and reception of real time television but those services were mainly restricted to Lagos and major cities of Nigeria such as
Ibadan Ibadan (, ; ) is the Capital city, capital and most populous city of Oyo State, in Nigeria. It is the List of Nigerian cities by population, third-largest city by population in Nigeria after Lagos and Kano (city), Kano, with a total populatio ...
,
Enugu Enugu () verbally pronounced as "Enụgwụ" by the Igbo indigenes is a state in the South-East geopolitical zone of Nigeria, bordered to the north by the states of Benue and Kogi, Ebonyi State to the east and southeast, Abia State to the so ...
, Kaduna, and Port-Harcourt. The firm's major investment was in building a HF transmission and receiving station. The firm began providing automatic telex service in 1971 and in 1980, NET introduced international Direct Dialing and faster telex services between Nigeria and select Western countries. NET also offered private leased telegraph services with annual subscription fees to companies and managed television events transmitted or received via satellite such as FESTAC 77 and sporting events. For much of its existence, NET's facilities were inadequate compared to the needs of the business and wider population, man times the lines were congested as available lines on the telephone trunks could not keep up with the traffic.


NITEL

Nigerian Telecommunications Limited was formed in 1985 as the combination of the telecommunications division of Post and Telecommunications and NET. The new company was formed to improve coordination of telecommunication services within the country, to make internal communications more commercial in objective and to reduce duplication of budgetary allocations and investments. NITEL inherited mostly analogue infrastructure from its predecessors and had to fund new investments in digital infrastructures. It introduced
mobile telephony Mobile telephony is the provision of wireless telephone services to mobile phones, distinguishing it from fixed-location telephony provided via landline phones. Traditionally, telephony specifically refers to voice communication, though th ...
in 1992, through MTS, a partnership with Digital Communications Limited, an Atlanta-based firm. However, operationally, it was still inefficient, the lines were congested, the billing system was inefficient and the call completion rate for long-distance calls was below 50%. When new private telephone services emerged in Lagos during the 1990s, many of them depended on an unreliable NITEL for inter-connectivity services. In addition, demand for services in some cities was much higher than the capacity of NITEL while many NITEL lines were inoperative due to lack of maintenance of infrastructure or inadequate supporting cable network infrastructure. In 2002, MTEL which had acquired the assets of MTS, obtained a
GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...
license. Beginning in 2001, the company went through a period of botched sales and divestment, the first was the proposed sale of 51% stake to a group of investors under the trading name of Investors International London limited, the sale was cancelled after the investors failed to make the final bid price. Subsequently, the government stopped capital investment in the firm and approved a management turnaround contract with a firm called Pentascope in 2003. The contract was cancelled in 2005 after it became clear Pentascope did not have the adequate resources to run NITEL. Another failed divestment to Orascom in 2005 followed before the firm was sold to a subsidiary of Transcorp in 2007, but that sale was revoked in 2009. In 2014, the firm was sold to NATCOM, a group of investors led by Tunde Ayeni.


References

{{Reflist Telecommunications companies of Nigeria Nigerian brands