“1million Lines Disconnected in SIM Card Revalidation Exercise” – NCC

According to the latest statistics for the month of December released by the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, one million unregistered mobile phone lines have been blocked from the network of telecom operators in the ongoing revalidation of telecommunications subscriber base

Active customers in Nigeria’s Telecommunications Industry plunged by 1,105,928 in the month of December 2015, and total active subscribers’ lines was 151,017,244 as at December 31, 2015; this was down from 152,123,172 as at November 31, 2015, the NCC statistics reveal.

The four leading operators of Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) namely; MTN, Glo, Airtel, and Etisalat, control 148,681,362 of the 151,017,244 active lines.

The mobile operators’ active customers reduced by 1,105,758 as against the 149,787,120 subscribers they recorded in the month of November. The Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators had 2,148,727 active users in December, indicating a decrease of 393 from the 2,149,120 customers they had in November. Also, the monthly subscriber data showed that the Fixed Wired/Wireless networks’ consumers increased to 187,155 in December as they added 383 customers to their record of 186,772 in November.

Nigeria’s teledensity which measure the percentage of the population with access to telecoms services also went down to 107.87 per cent in December from the 108.66 per cent in the month of November, decreasing by 0.79 per cent.