MTN Nigeria’s Chief Executive Officer, Karl Toriola, has dismissed calls for unlimited mobile data plans, saying no telecom operator anywhere in the world can sustain such offerings without either crippling service quality or charging prohibitively high fees.
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Toriola spoke Saturday in Lagos at a press conference dubbed “Data on Trial,” where he fielded questions on data pricing and growing consumer frustration over the cost of internet access in Nigeria.
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“The issue of unlimited data on mobile networks it does not exist anywhere in the world, except you are paying $400 a month or whatever,” he said. “There are high bundles and fair usage policies. On mobile networks, it does not really exist. There is a limit, because you can never build enough capacity for everyone to be on an unlimited bundle and still provide quality service.”
The MTN boss argued that the economics of telecommunications infrastructure make blanket unlimited access impossible to sustain at affordable price points, no matter how strong the consumer appetite for it.
To drive home his point, Toriola reached for an analogy from the aviation sector. “If you decide to give everybody in Nigeria unlimited local air tickets for ₦200,000 a month, do you think the airline industry will survive? It won’t. It doesn’t work that way.”
He warned that pressuring operators to offer unlimited data at low costs would ultimately undermine the very networks consumers depend on. “We cannot give unlimited, as much as we desire it. We won’t be able to build the network that people would be able to use in any way whatsoever. That is the reality,” he added.
Toriola’s comments come amid mounting public pressure on Nigerian telecoms over data pricing, with many subscribers arguing that internet access remains unaffordable for large segments of the population.
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