Summary

  • Nigeria's inspected MVNO working draft allows 120 days from a formal hosting request to conclude commercial and technical agreements. It does not promise a working service by day 120.
  • The hearing recorded conflicting demands over access, qualification and pricing. Its 190 online attendees cannot be counted as endorsements of a single settlement.

A signed agreement does not carry a phone call. Before a mobile virtual network operator can serve customers through another company's network, somebody must settle the interfaces, test the connection, arrange billing and decide who handles a failure. Nigeria's proposed MVNO business rules try to put dates around that work. The dates are less interchangeable than they first appear.

The working draft gives a host ten days to acknowledge a written hosting request and name commercial and technical leads. A different clock—twenty days—starts when the required documents arrive. The host must then explain its readiness to proceed or specify the additional information or conditions it needs. A refusal requires a justified written explanation to both the applicant and Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) within that same twenty-day period.

There is also an outer deadline that the earlier article omitted. Section 9(5) requires commercial and technical agreements within 120 days of the formal request. Internal approval processes cannot override it. Schedule A repeats the agreement timetable.

That is a substantial proposed constraint, but not a guaranteed launch date. The draft separately calls for a joint project plan covering design, integration, testing, numbering or SIM dependencies, customer care, settlement and launch milestones. Completion requires a Technical Readiness Certificate signed by both parties and notification to NCC. The difference matters to a business planning its first customer revenue: a contract and an operational connection are two different deliverables.

A licence meets somebody else's network

An MVNO sells mobile services while relying on a host for network functions within its licensing model. That creates a negotiation between firms that need each other but need not want the same terms. The July 16 public inquiry made the differences unusually concrete.

HyMobile wanted mandatory wholesale access and stronger onboarding enforcement. MTN sought objective entry criteria, broader documentation requirements, more technical-review time and protection against wholesale credit risk. Airtel asked for stronger qualification requirements, wider grounds for onboarding delays and more pricing flexibility. EMTS (9mobile) opposed mandatory hosting and regulated pricing, preferring commercial negotiation. VAS2NET (Lebara), by contrast, broadly supported the draft, including onboarding obligations and the proposed Tier 5 revenue-sharing benchmark.

These are attributed requests, not findings that any company obstructed a competitor. They nevertheless explain why a time limit alone cannot settle the negotiation. A short reply deadline offers little certainty if the parties still disagree about which documents make a request complete. A host's demand for a technical assessment is not, by itself, proof of a delaying tactic either. The eventual rule has to distinguish a reasoned condition from an indefinite wait.

The draft attempts that distinction by requiring specific answers and objectively justifiable sequencing where several MVNOs are being onboarded. It also says internal restructuring, competing priorities and non-regulatory approvals do not justify indefinite delay. Those provisions would make the explanation for waiting inspectable, rather than merely requiring an occasional reply.

Fifty per cent of what?

The pricing dispute has a similar trap. The draft table gives indicative MVNO shares of 25%, 30%, 40%, 50% and 50% for Tiers 1 through 5. A headline about a fifty-fifty split is easy to write. It leaves out the calculation that determines how much money there is to split.

The proposed base is a benchmark selling price less permitted deductions. For voice and SMS, the draft identifies interconnect costs; for data, bandwidth costs; it also allows other deductions expressly approved or determined by NCC. Records must support independent verification. A revenue percentage is not a profit margin, and a wider deduction can change the value of the same percentage.

Nor does the word “indicative” resolve the legal force of the table. Surrounding clauses use mandatory language about applying the benchmark and the share for each tier, while also referring to lawful commercial arrangements, actual responsibilities and market conditions. That combination needs to be read together. It is neither a final tariff already in force nor simply an invitation to disregard the percentages.

The inspected document identifies itself as an amended working draft dated April 10, with May 2026 on the cover. It predates the hearing. NCC's licensing index, checked on October 25, still labels it a draft. That observation cannot establish whether a later instrument exists elsewhere; it does mean this text cannot demonstrate what changed in response to July's discussion.

The next document needs to show the choices

The consultation notice set June 29 for written submissions before the July hearing. The resulting report, dated August 20, counts 190 virtual participants and separately describes physical attendance without a number. It is a record of participation, not a vote for one pricing or access model.

The report says NCC presented remarks at the inquiry and that its Technical Review Committee would examine the submissions. Its published table lists stakeholders and their issues, however, not the disposition of each proposed change. It would be wrong to turn that missing column into a claim that the regulator said nothing or ignored the comments.

A revised text and an explanation of the choices would answer the more useful question. Which conditions may a host impose, which costs may it deduct, and when can the regulator intervene? Those answers—not the attendance total—will show whether a licence becomes easier to turn into a service.

Updated October 25, 2026: Added the omitted 120-day agreement provision, distinguished agreement from service launch, and clarified attendance and working-draft status. The original URL and publication date are retained.