With the advent of GSM in Nigeria, the market has been expanding tremendously with so many value added services coming on board. As the subscriber base grew, so also network providers.
At the onset of this telecom boom, Nigerians quickly adapted to recognising the network providers by the mobile numbers. It was easy, since we were taught that to identify a mobile network provider, simply look at the first 4 characters of the caller ID number.
This was captured with prefixes as follows:-
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MTN - 0803
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Glo - 0805
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Zain, Airtel, Econet - 0802
In fact, my first number was a Globacom line, and it started with 0805, followed by an Airtel line which was prefixed as 0802. Things have greatly changed and this telecom providers have so far expanded and the Nigerian Communications Commission gave further mobile number prefixes to the telecom providers which still retained the first allocations.
Below is a list of mobile number telecom prefixes for major telecom providers in Nigeria.
0701 ---- Airtel Nigeria
0702 ---- Smile
07025 ---- Visafone
07026 ---- Visafone
07027 ---- Multi-Links
07028 ---- Starcomms
07029 ---- Starcomms
0703 ---- MTN Nigeria
0704 ---- Visafone
0705 ---- Globacom
0706 ---- MTN Nigeria
0707 ---- ZoomMobile (formerly Reltel)
0708 ---- Airtel Nigeria
0709 ---- Multi-Links
0802 ---- Airtel Nigeria
0803 ---- MTN Nigeria
0804 ---- Ntel
0805 ---- Globacom
0806 ---- MTN Nigeria
0807 ---- Globacom
0808 ---- Airtel Nigeria
0809 ---- 9mobile
0810 ---- MTN Nigeria
0811 ---- Globacom
0812 ---- Airtel Nigeria
0813 ---- MTN Nigeria
0814 ---- MTN Nigeria
0815 ---- Globacom
0816 ---- MTN Nigeria
0817 ---- 9mobile
0818 ---- 9mobile
0819 ---- Starcomms
0909 ---- 9mobile
0908 ---- 9mobile
0902 ---- Airtel Nigeria
0903 ---- MTN Nigeria
0905 ---- Globacom
0906 ---- MTN Nigeria
0907 ---- Airtel Nigeria
So any time you get a caller id with any of the above prefixes, you should be able to identify the network provider.
Additional information can be gotten from NCC.