An Attempt to Identify “Data Theft” by Airtel, GLO, and MTN Or Not

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) bowed to tremendous pressure from telecom operators in January to approve their request to raise call and data rates. Following this, Nigerians were hit harder by yet another type of inflation in the nation.

Nigerians quickly moved on despite promises of protests against the latest raise coming from various parts of the nation, but another stage of the crippling expense of living emerged. Nigerians were accustomed to increased data and call charges, so it was unexpected when data suddenly “disappeared” from phones and other mobile devices.

The new experience was that subscribers no longer received the same marginal value for their money, even with the inflated amount Nigerians were now paying for data. 

Online complaints cover everything from mysterious data charges to data that suddenly “disappears.”

“A random friend contacted another friend to complain that he paid N20,000 for an Airtel pocket mifi that promised 30GB of data for free during the first month. After three days of very little use, the data was done. In Nigeria, scammers are everywhere, including corporate entities! In February, an X user made a report.

Some even attempted to track how much bandwidth they used, but there are still unanswered problems over how carriers bill their customers.

For example, MTN uses a carrier message to inform users of the amount utilized during each internet session, but this does not take into consideration the rates at which data is charged.

In addition to displaying the data balance, Glo’s data balance check feature also displays the amount of time a user has spent browsing over a specific day.

In contrast to data charging, call rates are quite easy to quantify. For example, calls are priced at 23 kobo per second under the MTN Pulse tariff. The cost of a one-minute call at this rate would be about N13.8. Inferentially, up to seven minutes of call time should be available with N100 worth of MTN airtime.

The invoices are regular.

However, there are some complications that make measuring data billing a little challenging.

First, under certain circumstances, data may appear to be vanishing. The two main options that most phone users frequently ignore are automatic app upgrades and background data usage, which enable phones to steal data covertly.

Additionally, there are a variety of video qualities available for streaming. Thus, differing pixel sizes for streaming video would result in varied data billing. Additionally, it can occasionally be challenging to quantify data billing due to variations in webpages, phone quality, and internet speed.

FIJ tested with the three main carriers in the nation—MTN, Airtel, and Glo—while keeping these considerations in mind. Every telco was exposed to the same conditions during the experiment.

As you can see by clicking the link, FIJ’s experiment also shows how vague telcos are about data usage and the cost of downloading and streaming mobile games on YouTube.

This thorough experiment’s findings validate the irregularity of network providers’ data billing. Given the NCC’s explanation of the likely distinction between telco data billing and phone usage, a straightforward test shouldn’t reveal a significant difference, particularly when background downloads and other underground data billers were turned off before the test.

For example, MTN overcharged for YouTube streaming at the lowest video quality while significantly undercharging for a 1GB game by invoicing only 660MB. Customers can’t trust MTN’s data billing, if anything.

Users would still have to deal with their bills. The chance for sabotage arises if phones are unable to at least provide a reasonable approximation of the amount of data that is invoiced.