Can We Actually Trust NIGCOMSAT to Power Our Apps?

I was scrolling through the news this morning while waiting for my local Gen to cool down, and I saw that NIGCOMSAT pulled in about ₦2.2 billion ($1.6 million) in revenue for 2025. On paper, jumping from ₦650 million the previous year looks like a massive win. Jane Egerton-Idehen is saying it’s a "growth curve," not just a fluke.

But as someone who spends his days looking at uptime monitors and worrying about latency, I have to ask: what does this actually change for those of us building products in Nigeria?

The Broadband Dream vs. The Reality

Right now, broadcasting is paying their bills—more than 50% of that revenue comes from TV stations. That’s fine, but as a dev, I’m looking at that "broadband" goal. They want to hit ₦8 billion by tapping into the internet market.

If you’ve ever tried to run a startup that targets people in rural Adamawa or Cross River, you know the struggle. Fiber isn't coming to those places anytime soon because the ROI for telcos is trash. Satellite is the only way to get those users online. If NIGCOMSAT can actually provide stable backhaul for those remote base stations, it opens up a whole new user base for us.

Imagine shipping an edtech or agritech app and actually having it load in a village without the user having to climb a tree to find a signal. That’s the dream.

The Trust Factor (and that $11.4M Debt)

Here’s the part that makes me nervous. There’s an ongoing dispute with a Chinese company (CGWIC) over $11.4 million in unpaid fees. They’re the ones managing the satellite. In my world, if you don't pay the people managing your infrastructure, things start to break. It’s like forgetting to renew your AWS credits or having a falling out with your lead DevOps engineer.

NIGCOMSAT is still trying to win back trust after their first satellite died back in 2008. In tech, trust is everything. If I’m going to route my company’s data or my users' connectivity through your hardware, I need to know the "ping" is going to stay consistent and the "server" isn't going to get switched off because of a payment dispute.

Moving Beyond the Lagos Bubble

We spend so much time building for the "Lagos Island" crowd because that’s where the 5G and fiber are. But Nigeria is massive.

The fact that state governments like Gombe and Imo are already using NIGCOMSAT for digital infrastructure is interesting. If they can fix the service quality gaps Jane mentioned, we might finally be able to stop obsessing over "lite" versions of our apps and actually build rich experiences for everyone, regardless of where they are.

I’m cautiously optimistic. I want to see NIGCOMSAT succeed because we need more options than just the usual telcos who seem to struggle the moment a heavy rain starts in Lagos. But until that $11.4 million dispute is cleared and we see that 2028 replacement satellite actually launch, I’ll be keeping my backup plans ready.

What do you guys think? Would you trust a state-owned satellite to handle your app's rural traffic, or are you sticking with the big telcos for now?