Telecoms Subscriber Figures Soar 11.9% In 12 Months

Mobile telecommunications operators in the country have posted 11.9 per cent growth between September 2014 and September 2015 in their subscriber figures.

According to the latest statistics released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on its website, MTN, Glo, Airtel and Etisalat, who are the major operators, led the growth as subscriber base grew from 134.5 million to 150.6 million.

The NCC database figures showed that only the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and fixed wired/wireless segments of the sector did not contributing anything to the growth, as these two segments continue to experience consistent decline in their subscriptions.

Also, the figures showed that the deactivation of mobile lines as instructed by NCC led to a loss of 357,997 active lines on various mobile networks last month in September. From 151,018,624 active telephone lines in August, the number of active telephone lines on mostly GSM operators including MTN, Globacom, Airtel and Etisalat declined to 150,660,631 phone lines in September.

Furthermore, the teledensity, which is used to determine their number of telephone lines available to 100 people within a given geographical area, plunged from 107.87 per cent in August to 107.61 per cent in September, representing a fall of 0.26 per cent. It varies widely across the nations and also between urban and rural areas within a country.