Sheriff Adepoju, a senior software engineer, says Nigeria’s plan to fine telecommunication operators about N12.4 billion for poor service will not significantly change consumers’ experience unless operators invest in “recovery engineering.”

The expert, who works at Oracle, said this while reacting to the Nigerian Communications Commission’s (NCC) move to impose a N12.4 billion penalty for breaches of service standards.

The NCC announced that it had begun updating its enforcement process to strengthen deterrence, following a directive by the Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Bosun Tijani, who instructed it to introduce automatic penalties for network failures within 90 days.

The goal, according to Mr Tijani, is to tighten the link between service breakdowns and consequences for operators.

However, Mr Adepoju argued that “fines may punish after a failure but do not automatically improve the telecoms’ capability to fix future failures faster”, insisting that recovery engineering remained the missing layer.

The expert noted that networks constantly face disruptions, such as fibre cuts, power issues, equipment faults, software errors, and congestion during peak use.

“Recovery engineering is the combination of tools, processes, and trained responses that ensures disruptions are detected early, handed to the right team quickly, resolved safely, and communicated clearly to customers.

“Without this, customers are left in repeated cycles of ‘try again’, unclear timelines, and customer care conversations that cannot change the technical reality,” he said.

He recalled that the NCC recently reported that monthly mobile data usage increased from approximately 518,000 terabytes in January 2023 to over 1.23 million terabytes by November 2025.

He added that the commission equally said broadband subscriptions increased to about 109.6 million by December 2025, increasing broadband penetration to 50.58 per cent.

Mr Adepoju noted that Nigeria’s telecom challenge was growing because demand was growing faster than operators’ ability to recover quickly from routine failures.

“In practical terms, recovery engineering changes what happens during an outage. First, operators must quickly identify that a problem exists, instead of waiting for complaints to pile up.

“Secondly, they must have a clear internal process that immediately assigns responsibility so that faults do not bounce between teams. Thirdly, they must restore service in a controlled manner that avoids creating new problems.

“A common failure pattern in large systems is when repeated ‘retry’ attempts overload a weak system and extend the outage. Recovery engineering prevents this through limits and safeguards so that a short disruption does not turn into a long one,” he said.

The expert also emphasised customer communication as part of recovery, not as a public relations add-on.

According to him, when a network is down, customers mainly want two things: the truth about what is happening and a credible estimate of the restoration time.

In Mr Adepoju’s view, operators could only provide accurate updates when those updates were tied to real recovery steps—detection, diagnosis, repair, and verification—and not when customer care was forced to guess.

“The NCC’s N12.4 billion penalties may raise the cost of poor service; however, lasting improvement will require operators to prove recovery performance—how fast they detect failures, how fast they restore service, and how consistently they communicate during incidents.

“Without that recovery capability, fines will not translate into better day-to-day telecom experiences for Nigerians,” he insisted.

(NAN)