Network Reliability: The Quiet Engine of Creators

A single dropped call doesn’t just annoy you. In Nigeria’s creator economy, it can cancel a brand deal, derail a livestream, stall a remote shoot, or delay a payment confirmation that a small business needs right now.

That’s why I liked the way telecoms infrastructure expert Ibikunle Peters describes his job: “keeping the lights on.” It sounds modest until you realise what the “lights” power in 2025 Nigeria—music releases promoted on WhatsApp, customer support calls for Instagram stores, creator collaborations coordinated across time zones, and election-grade deployments that demand near-zero failure.

This post sits inside our series on How AI is powering Nigeria’s digital content & creator economy, but we’re starting one level lower than AI: the network. Because no matter how smart your tools are, AI for creators can’t help you publish, sell, or collaborate if the underlying connectivity keeps wobbling.

The creator economy runs on boring reliability

Reliable telecom infrastructure is the base layer of Nigeria’s digital content ecosystem. Creators don’t just “post content.” They negotiate, confirm deliverables, take approvals, send invoices, run communities, and handle customer complaints—often across voice calls and mobile data.

When Peters says a nationwide outage would cause panic, he isn’t exaggerating. Voice and messaging are still the fastest coordination tools for:

• Creators managing teams (editors, videographers, stylists)
• Influencers confirming last-minute shoot changes
• Online vendors handling delivery riders and customer updates
• Podcasters booking guests and conducting quick pre-interviews
• Agencies tracking approvals with brands and legal teams

Here’s the part many people miss: network reliability isn’t only about “having bars.” It’s about call setup success, call quality, correct billing, and stable availability—day and night. Those are the quiet metrics that decide whether your workday flows or becomes a series of apologies.

What actually happens when you place a phone call (and why it matters to creators)

A voice call is a chain of systems, not one magical signal. Peters breaks it down in a way that’s useful even if you’re not technical: your phone connects to a nearby mast, the network identifies you, routes the call correctly (on-net or interconnect), and applies the right charging rules.

The mast (BTS): your first handshake with the network

Base Transceiver Stations (BTS)—the masts you see along roads—are the first point of contact. Peters compares them to Wi‑Fi routers covering an area: closer usually means stronger signal.

For creators, the practical takeaway is simple: if you record content in a location with weak coverage, you’re not just risking slow uploads. You’re risking:

• Incomplete file transfers to clients
• Failed verification codes for logins
• Missed calls from collaborators
• Poor audio quality for interviews

The controller layer (BSC): traffic management for voice

A mast doesn’t work alone. Networks coordinate groups of masts using controllers such as a Base Station Controller (BSC).

Think of this as traffic management. If you’ve ever noticed your call quality changing as you move from one street to another, you’ve experienced the effect of that coordination.

The identity database (HLR): “who are you and what can you do?”

The Home Location Register (HLR) is a core database that helps the network recognise your line, your status, and how your call should be treated.

Peters highlights three creator-relevant realities here:

1. Number analysis affects pricing and access. The system checks whether you’re in-country or roaming, and it can treat numbers differently (e.g., toll-free lines, restricted calls).
2. On-net vs interconnect isn’t just jargon. Calls within the same network (on-net) and calls across networks (interconnect) can behave differently because they cross operator boundaries.
3. Compliance runs through these systems. Operators must share required information with regulators and apply correct charging rules—meaning the network is built for accountability, not just convenience.

A one-liner worth remembering: every “hello” is a database lookup plus a routing decision.

“Keeping the lights on” is a career—and a national safeguard

Telecom reliability is operations work under pressure, not a one-time installation. Peters’ decade-plus journey—spanning Huawei, Airtel, and 9Mobile (now T2 Mobile)—shows why: the network is alive. It needs monitoring, patching, scaling, and constant troubleshooting.

One of the clearest examples is Nigeria’s 2023 general elections. Peters was part of the effort to deploy over 68,000 SIM cards to support the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). The assignment wasn’t “just hand out SIMs.” It was:

• Provisioning at massive scale
• Verifying configurations
• Ensuring SIMs were active and functional
• Coordinating stakeholders with tight deadlines
• Troubleshooting in the field under public scrutiny

That kind of deployment has a creator-economy parallel: big campaigns. When a brand launches a nationwide promo with dozens of creators posting within a two-hour window, the stress looks different but the dependency is the same.

A strong stance: Nigeria’s digital economy doesn’t need more hype. It needs more boring competence—people who keep systems stable when everyone else is shouting.

Where AI fits: from reactive fixes to predictive networks

AI in telecoms is shifting network operations from reactive firefighting to predictive maintenance and automation. Peters points out a trend we’re seeing across Nigeria: operators investing in infrastructure (including data centres) because AI growth depends on compute and reliable networks.

So what does AI actually change behind the scenes?

1) Faster fault detection and root-cause analysis

Modern networks generate huge volumes of logs and performance counters. AI systems can:

• Spot anomalies (like a sudden spike in call drops in a cluster)
• Correlate symptoms across layers (radio, core, billing)
• Recommend likely causes (power issues, congestion, misconfiguration)

For creators, this shows up as fewer “random bad days” when your uploads crawl or calls refuse to connect.

2) Smarter capacity planning for peak moments

Nigeria’s internet usage is spiky—holidays, football nights, major entertainment drops, election cycles, and end-of-year events.

AI helps operators forecast demand and allocate resources more intelligently, reducing congestion in hotspots. For the creator economy, that matters in December more than any month:

• Event season content uploads
• Heavy livestreaming
• Aggressive brand campaign timelines
• Cross-border travel with roaming needs

3) Automation at enterprise scale (the part creators should care about)

Peters mentions a key insight: there’s more beyond prompting; enterprise automation is where real value sits.

Translated: AI that’s wired into workflows (alerts, runbooks, approvals, configuration checks) reduces downtime because it shortens the time between “issue detected” and “issue fixed.”

And downtime hits creators twice—lost time and lost trust.

Practical playbook: how creators can build around network realities

You can’t control the network, but you can design your workflow so a weak signal doesn’t break your income. Here are the habits I’ve found creators and small digital teams benefit from.

1) Treat connectivity like production equipment

If you budget for a ring light, you can budget for redundancy.

• Keep two SIMs from different networks if your work depends on calls and approvals
• Save critical brand contacts on WhatsApp and as direct numbers
• Schedule uploads when your area is typically stable (late night or early morning often works)

2) Separate “approval” from “delivery”

Many deals fail because approvals are trapped inside one channel.

• Confirm deliverables via voice call when timelines are tight
• Follow up with a written recap message immediately after
• Ask for an alternate contact person in case a line is unreachable

3) Build a low-bandwidth mode for your business

When networks degrade, creators who can still operate win.

• Maintain compressed preview versions of videos for quick approvals
• Use audio-only calls for interviews if video keeps freezing
• Keep templates for invoices, contracts, and briefs accessible offline

4) Use AI tools that reduce your dependency on perfect connectivity

This is where the series theme comes back in: AI for content creation isn’t just about making content faster; it’s about making operations resilient.

Examples:

• Auto-transcription and summarisation after a call (so you don’t need to re-call for details)
• Automated client follow-ups and reminders
• Offline-first note apps that sync later
• Batch editing with AI assistance so you upload once, not five times

A clear rule: use AI to cut the number of “must-be-online” moments in your workflow.

Career angle: the telecom skills that map well to AI-era work

Telecom careers reward people who can combine systems thinking with practical troubleshooting. Peters’ path is also a roadmap for anyone trying to enter the infrastructure side of the digital economy.

He points to skills that remain evergreen:

• SQL and database thinking (because networks are full of mission-critical records)
• Linux administration (many core systems run on Linux)
• Monitoring and incident response habits (how you find and fix issues under time pressure)
• People skills and emotional intelligence (because outages are human problems too)

If you’re coming from a non-CS background, his story is encouraging: he studied chemistry, then self-taught into tech through relentless curiosity and practice.

For Nigeria’s creator economy, this matters because the ecosystem needs more than creators. It needs operators, reliability engineers, automation specialists, and data centre talent—the people who make “post” and “publish” feel instant.

What the next 12 months will reward in Nigeria’s creator economy

The creators who grow fastest in 2026 will treat infrastructure and AI as a pair: stability plus speed. You’ll see it in how they run teams, manage campaigns, and handle customer conversations.

Network reliability will keep being the invisible deciding factor—especially as AI-generated content increases the volume of uploads, edits, renders, and distribution tasks competing for bandwidth.

If you’re building in this space—creator, brand, agency, or platform—here’s the forward-looking question worth sitting with: as AI makes content easier to produce, will your connectivity and operations be strong enough to distribute it reliably?