MTN Nigeria, between January 2021 and December of the same year, recorded the biggest loss of Internet subscribers (5,176,068).
According to data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), a total of 9.28 million telecommunication subscribers stopped using the Internet last year.
As seen in the data, MTN, which began the year under review with 63,988,496 subscribers, ended with 58,812,428 subscribers, a development that indicated that the telco giant topped the chart of losers.
Airtel lost 2,507,138 Internet subscribers, as the number of Internet subscribers dropped to 37,526,624 at the end of the year.
9mobile lost 1,127,391 Internet, as the number of its Internet subscribers fell to 5,752,702 at the end of the year.
Globacom lost 470,502 Internet subscribers, as the number of its Internet subscribers fell to 39,525,269 at the end of the year.
Defending its loss, MTN, in its half-year report, blamed it on the Federal Government’s National Identity Number (NIN)-Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) data verification.
“Mobile subscribers declined by 7.6 million to 68.9 million, impacted by the regulatory restrictions on new SIM sales and activations,” MTN said, as it claimed to be in full support of the NIN-SIM data verification.
Like MTN, Airtel, in one of its quarterly reports, stated that “new customer acquisitions were barred until significant progress had been made on linking the active customer base with verified NINs.
“Natural churn in the customer base led to a loss of two million active mobile customers in Nigeria in the first quarter of the year (following on from 2.5 million customer loss in the final quarter of the year to 31 March 2021).”
