During and after its years of monopoly, the performance of the firm was sub-par, a behavior similar to other state owned enterprises such as NEPA and government-owned water corporations.

A February 2008 report by the BBC revealed that the Nigerian government assumed the transnational corporation did not improve performance of NITEL and therefore stopped privatization in favour of Transcorp.

[citation needed] In 2015, the government eventually finalized a transaction that saw NITEL and Mtel's assets handed over to NATCOM.

Telegraph services began in the 1880s and was initially managed by the Public Works Department until 1907 when those services were transferred to P & T.[5] In 1908, a manual telephone exchange with a magneto switchboard of 100 lines was introduced in Lagos and by 1920 the estimate of telephone lines in the country was 920, at 920.

[6] The new firm provided international telephone, telex and telegraph services, high speed data transmission and transmission and reception of real time television but those services were mainly restricted to Lagos and major cities of Nigeria such as Ibadan, Enugu, Kaduna, and Port-Harcourt.

The new company was formed to improve coordination of telecommunication services within the country, to make internal communications more commercial in objective and to reduce duplication of budgetary allocations and investments.

[4] It introduced mobile telephony in 1992, through MTS, a partnership with Digital Communications Limited, an Atlanta-based firm.