Nigeria’s fibre boom is reshaping the country’s broadband market, lifting speeds and bringing more users onto faster networks. But the bigger test is no longer just how quickly fibre can be deployed. It is whether the growing capacity can translate into affordable, reliable internet for more households and businesses.
That shift is already visible in the data. The biggest gains are coming among users with the slowest connections, suggesting Nigeria is not simply making the internet faster—it is raising the country’s broadband floor. The challenge now is turning that infrastructure progress into wider access.
Ookla’s latest data shows that Nigeria’s fixed broadband speeds have improved significantly. The median download speed, excluding satellite connections, rose 155% from 13.50 megabits per second (Mbps) in 2023 to 34.47 Mbps in the first half of 2026. Upload speeds also nearly doubled to 25.17 Mbps, while the time it takes data to travel across the network, known as latency, fell from 47.9 milliseconds to 35.8 milliseconds.
But the median speed does not tell the whole story.
A closer look at the fastest and slowest users shows where the biggest change is happening. The bottom 10% represents users with the slowest connections, while the top 10% represents those with the fastest.
For users with the weakest connections, download speeds rose from 2.24 Mbps in 2023 to 6.04 Mbps in the first half of 2026. Among users with the strongest connections, speeds increased from 74.37 Mbps to 90.04 Mbps.
In other words, the biggest gains are happening at the bottom. Nigeria is not just making its fastest internet connections faster; it is also improving the experience of people who previously had some of the weakest connections.