Advertisement It was in October 2019 that Nigerian consumers first became aware of the dispute between Nigerian banks and telco providers over who pays for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) services customers enjoyed. This must-have sounded strange to the customers seeing as they were already being charged for the service. The Association of Licensed Telecommunications of Nigeria (ALTON) had complained about the undue silence of key stakeholders in resolving the crisis of the USSD service between the banks and the telcos in Nigeria and threatened then to shut down the platforms if a consensus was not reached. The ALTON Chairman, Engr Gbenga Adebayo pointed out that contrary to popular beliefs that USSD cost is a sunk cost as championed by the CBN, the USSD is an infrastructure which the network operators had invested much into, and so could not offer it free to the banks.