The Price of a Phone Call Nobody Has Touched Since 2018

There is a price in Nigeria's telecoms market that almost no consumer has ever heard of, and yet it shapes the cost of nearly every call they make. It is called the mobile termination rate, the wholesale fee one network pays another to complete a call that ends on a rival's line. Today it sits at 3.90 naira per minute for established operators and 4.70 naira for new entrants. It has not changed since 2018.

Eight years is a long time for any price to stand still. In Nigeria, where the naira has lost much of its value and inflation has reshaped the cost of everything, it is an eternity. In June 2026 the Nigerian Communications Commission finally moved to reopen that figure, launching a comprehensive review of interconnection rates and engaging the consultancy KPMG to run a study and stakeholder process expected to take around four months.

Why a wholesale number reaches your pocket

The termination rate is invisible to consumers but central to the economics of the entire sector. When you call across networks, your operator hands the call to another and pays it the termination fee. Multiply that by billions of minutes a month and you have one of the largest cost-and-revenue flows in the industry. Change it, and you change the arithmetic of every operator at once, and eventually the price on the consumer's bill.

The regulator has been explicit about why the old framework no longer fits. Set in 2018 and adjusted in 2022, it predates the rollout of 5G, the explosion of data-led services, and the arrival of mobile virtual network operators that lease capacity rather than own it. Layered on top is the macroeconomic story every Nigerian business knows by heart: a weaker currency and higher costs that have transformed what operators spend to keep a network running.

The stakes, measured in subscribers

The scale of what is being adjusted is easy to underestimate. Nigeria's active mobile lines reached about 182 million in early 2026, and active internet subscriptions climbed past 153 million by March. MTN alone serves more than 82 million subscribers, Airtel over 54 million, Globacom over 15 million. Whatever the review concludes will ripple across one of the largest mobile markets on the continent.

This is not the first time prices have moved recently, and that history colours the present anxiety. In January 2025 the NCC approved a 50 percent increase in telecom tariffs, the first such adjustment in over a decade, and operators raised data and call prices within weeks, with bundle costs climbing by an estimated 15 to 30 percent. For consumers already absorbing that shock, the word review carries an unmistakable subtext: another rise may be coming.

Eight years of a frozen price in a currency that did not stay frozen is not stability. It is a bill quietly accumulating, waiting for someone to decide who pays it.— On the politics of a delayed rate review

Who actually wins from a higher rate

The operators frame the review carefully. Higher termination rates, they argue, are not automatically higher consumer prices; the outcome, they insist, depends on the cost data KPMG gathers and could, in principle, even push some prices down. What they want, in their own words, is cost-reflective pricing, rates that match what it genuinely costs to run a network in 2026 rather than 2018.

There is a real fairness argument buried here, and it is worth taking seriously. A price held artificially low for years does not make telecoms free. It simply shifts the strain onto operator balance sheets, which eventually shows up as underinvestment, patchier coverage, and slower data, the quiet erosion that consumers feel without ever seeing a line item. A rate that has not moved while every input cost has is not a gift to the public. It is a deferred cost.

But the politics cut the other way. Asking 182 million subscribers, many of them already stretched by the 2025 hikes, to pay more for the most basic act of connection is a hard case to make in a country where a phone line is not a luxury but the on-ramp to banking, identity, and work. The review also reaches into the unglamorous machinery beneath all this: international termination rates, the grey-route traffic that dodges them, and a pricing framework for the new virtual operators.

What the next four months really decide is who absorbs eight years of inflation that the rate book ignored. Spread it across operators, and investment suffers. Pass it to consumers, and connection gets more expensive in a market that can least afford it. The mobile termination rate is a number almost no one has heard of. By the time KPMG is finished, a great many people will feel it.