120 telephone exchanges. Investments in telecommunications moved the subscriber base to over 100,000 by 1973 and up to 400,000 by 1990. Nigerian External Telecommunications The history of NET can be traced to colonial rule towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1886, a telegraph service between Lagos and London was provided by African Direct Telegraph Company, this company later became Imperial and International Communications after a merger and then Cable and Wireless. Upon independence, the government of Nigerian decided to go into a partnership with Cable and Wireless, acquiring interest in the Nigerian arm of Cable and Wireless, and renaming the company Nigerian External Telecommunications. 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 firm's major investment was in building a HF transmission and receiving station. The firm began providing automatic telex service in 1971 and In 1980, NET introduced international Direct Dialing and faster telex services between Nigeria and select Western countries. NET also offered private leased telegraph services with annual subscription fees to companies and managed television events transmitted or received via satellite such as FESTAC 77 and sporting events. For much of its existence, NET's facilities were inadequate compared to the needs of the business and wider population, man times the lines were congested as available lines on the telephone trunks could not keep up with the traffic. NITEL Nigerian Telecommunications Limited was formed in 1985 as the combination of the telecommunications division of Post and Telecommunications and NET. 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. NITEL inherited mostly analogue infrastructure from its predecessors and had to fund new investments in digital infrastructures. It introduced mobile telephony in 1992, through MTS, a partnership with Digital Communications Limited, an Atlanta-based firm. However, operationally, it was still inefficient, the lines were congested, the billing system was inefficient and the call completion rate for long-distance calls was below 50%. When new private telephone services emerged in Lagos during the 1990s, many of them depended on an unreliable NITEL for inter-connectivity services. In addition, demand for services in some cities was much