The minister of communications and digital economy, Mr. Isa Pantami, has said that data costs reduced by 50 per cent since January 2020.
The minister disclosed this in statement entitled ‘Current cost of data reduced to less than 50% of January 2020 cost’ issued yesterday by his aide on technical assistant on information technology, Mr. Femi Adeluyi.
“The average cost of 1GB of data has reduced from the January 2020 cost of N1, 000 to N487.18 in November, 2020.
“This was based on a Report by the Nigerian Communications Commission submitted to the Honourable Minister following the implementation of the directives.”
“Based the Report by NCC, the average cost of data as at November 2020 was N487.18, which amounts to 47.33% lower than the projected value.
“The Report also indicates that the cost of data in November 2020 was less than 50% of the cost of data in January 2020,”
“Policies are in place to ensure that operators adopt competitive pricing that eschews unjustifiable margins. The general public may also wish to note that complaints about rapid data depletion are also being investigated,” said the minister.
It would be recalled that the federal government had inaugurated a committee that developed the Nigerian National Broadband Plan (2020-2025) on December 16, 2019.
The Plan, which was launched by the President Muhammadu Buhari in March 2020, aimed at reducing the average cost of 1GB of data to a maximum of N390 by 2025.
