The Nigerian government, through the National Broadband Council, has approved four fiber optic cable landing points in four coastal states to ensure widespread penetration of high capacity internet bandwidths in the country. The project will be financed by the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF).

The council said the landing points will be sited in Rivers, Bayelsa, Cross River and Ondo states in line with the government's effort to encourage telecos to establish cable landing points across the country.

Prior to this announcement, Nigeria only had a landing point in Lagos to facilitate international submarine optic cables from Main One Cable Company, MTN's West Africa Cable System (WACS), SAT 3 from the NITEL and Globacom's Glo 1 cable.

Speaking on this development, Chairman of the council and minister of communications technology, Omobola Johnson, said the cable landing points will promote the rapid establishment of recovery and restoration agreements among the cable companies and delivery of additional landing points for national security and resilience purposes.

"Additional landing points in the country would make it faster and cheaper to lay terrestrial cable from these points to other parts of the country and reduce vulnerability and risks associated with a single point of failure in the system," she said.