Phones · Act III — Glo and the Price of a Phone Call

Act I — The MTN Era (2001–2003): A Phone Call Cost a Day's Wages

In January 2001, the Nigerian Communications Commission auctioned three Digital Mobile Licences for US$285 million each. The winners were MTN (South Africa), Econet Wireless (a Zimbabwe-led consortium that became V-Mobile, then Celtel, then Zain, then Airtel), and the state-owned NITEL's M-Tel. The losing bidder was Communication Investment Limited — fronted by a then little-known Lagos businessman named Dr. Mike Adenuga Jr. — disqualified at the eleventh hour for missing the deposit deadline by hours.

GSM launched on 8 August 2001. The country went mad for it. But the terms of admission were brutal. A SIM card cost ₦20,000–₦35,000 in the early months (roughly six months of the federal minimum wage of ₦5,500). Tariffs were billed by the minute and rounded up: a 12-second call cost the same as a 59-second call. The standard MTN/V-Mobile rate was ₦50 per minute peak — meaning a four-minute conversation about nothing cost ₦200, a day's wages for most Nigerians. Per-second billing — the global GSM norm by 2001 — was specifically refused by the operators on the grounds that the Nigerian market would not bear the engineering cost. Incoming international calls were charged to the recipient. Handsets were locked. Cross-network calls cost double on-net rates. The phone in your pocket was a luxury asset, and the cartel — for what it was — knew it.

Act II — Glo Breaks the Cartel (2003–2011)

Adenuga did not go away. After the 2001 disqualification he sued, lobbied, and waited. In September 2002 the NCC awarded the second-national-operator (SNO) licence — a broader licence than the GSM trio's, covering fixed lines, international gateway and data — to Globacom Limited, his company, for US$200 million. On 29 August 2003, Glo Mobile launched commercial GSM service across Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt and 12 other cities.

It launched with one feature the cartel had said was impossible. Per-second billing from the first second of the first call, on every plan, on every handset, with no surcharge. Glo was the first GSM operator in Africa to offer it. Within ninety days the market repriced itself. MTN matched in November 2003, V-Mobile in early 2004, M-Tel later. The effective per-minute price collapsed — not because the headline rate fell immediately, but because Nigerians stopped paying for unused seconds. A typical 25-second call that had cost ₦50 now cost roughly ₦21.

Glo kept pressing. Free SIM cards by 2005. Free incoming calls (a global norm Nigeria had never received). On-net night and weekend calls at ₦5/min. By 2008 the average effective tariff had fallen to ₦15/min and below; by 2012 it was under ₦10. SIM cards that had cost ₦20,000 in 2001 were being handed out at petrol stations. Subscriber numbers went vertical: 266,000 (Dec 2001), 9.2 million (2004), 25 million (2005), 87 million (2010), 154 million (2015), 222 million (2024) — more lines than people, because most Nigerians now carry two SIMs to arbitrage networks.

The Cable: Glo-1 (2010)

The other half of the Glo story is buried in the seabed. On 22 September 2009 Globacom completed laying Glo-1, a 9,800-km submarine fibre-optic cable from Bude on the Cornwall coast to Alpha Beach, Lagos, with branches into Ghana, Senegal, Mauritania, Morocco, Spain and Portugal. It was lit commercially in June 2010. It was — and remains — the first submarine cable wholly owned and built by an African company. Before Glo-1, Nigeria's international bandwidth ran almost entirely over the SAT-3/WASC consortium cable controlled by NITEL, with wholesale prices among the highest in the world; an E1 circuit (2 Mbps) to London cost US$8,000–US$12,000 per month. Within eighteen months of Glo-1 going live, wholesale prices on the West African coast collapsed by 80–90%. The 2011–2013 entry of Main One Cable Company, the WACS cable and the ACE cable all priced themselves against Glo-1.

This is the deep cause of Nigeria's data economy. Mobile internet users went from 200,000 in 2000 to 24 million (2010), 87 million (2017) and 109 million in 2024. Smartphone penetration, effectively zero in 2008, reached 51% by 2024. Fintech (Paystack, Flutterwave, Opay), Nollywood streaming, Afrobeats global distribution, food delivery, BoltUber, the EndSARS livestreams — all of it rides on bandwidth that was unaffordable until a Yoruba-Ijebu businessman dragged a cable up the beach at Lekki.

The receipt

What Globacom did is not in dispute. The numbers — auction prices, tariff schedules, NCC subscriber data, cable landing dates — are matters of public record. What is sometimes forgotten is the counterfactual. Without the second-national-operator licence, without per-second billing in 2003, without Glo-1 in 2010, Nigerian telecoms would have looked like Cameroon's or Angola's: lower penetration, double the price, no domestic fintech, no Burna Boy on Spotify. The Glo decade is the single largest consumer-surplus transfer in modern Nigerian economic history. It is also the rare case where the transfer happened by competition, not by decree.

Adenuga is the second-richest Nigerian. He is also — by a measurement his rivals would prefer not be made — the man who refunded the country roughly US$3–5 billion a year in lower telecoms bills for two decades.