Airtel Nigeria says it has experienced 1,022 fibre cuts in the past eight months, which have affected its network quality of service.
The fibre cuts incidents happened between July 2019 and February 11, 2020, the Director of Corporate Communications and CSR, Airtel Nigeria, Emeka Oparah, told journalists at a press conference in Lagos on Thursday.
According to him, 405 cases of the fibre cut were as a result of road rehabilitation by construction workers across the country while 617 cases were due to vandalism.
Oparah called on the Federal Government to urgently declare telecoms infrastructure as Critical National Infrastructure, saying it would go a long way in helping to safeguard telecoms investment.
He also urged federal and state governments to hasten the approval process for right of way for fibre deployment as well as quicken the Environmental Impact Analysis approval process, noting that these actions would help solve the problem of network congestion and network failure.