The number of active telephony lines in Nigeria rose to 127 million as at December, 2013, amid the prevalence of poor Quality of Service (QoS), according to the Nigerian Communications Communication (NCC).
Only recently, the telecommunications regulator, asked India’s Bharti Airtel, South Africa’s MTN Nigeria, and national carrier, Globacom to pay a cumulative fine of N647.5 million for failing to meet the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), for QoS in the month of January 2014. The three firms were also barred from selling Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards, with effect from 1st till 31st of March 2014, until KPIs improved. Analysts expect subscriber acquisition to take a downward trajectory in Q1 of 2014.The latest subscriber statistics, the December edition, released, weekend, by the commission, shows that the country’s, connected 169m telephone lines covering the GSM, Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operator and Fixed wired/wireless lines, out of which 127m were currently active by end of December. Meanwhile, in the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) scheme, launched on April 22, 2013 by the regulator, about 45,101 subscribers switched mobile operators in the fourth quarter of 2013.
Further breakdown of the statistics showed that the quartet of GSM operators including MTN, Globacom, Airtel and Etisalat Nigeria, connected 159m lines with 124m active. The CDMA networks, whose fortunes have continued to dwindle in the last five years, sustained a downward trajectory with a connection of 7.6m lines, while only 2.4m lines remained active. The fixed wired/wireless operators however connected 2.3m lines with only 360,537 lines left active. Besides, the country saw a growth in its tele-density, from 81.7 percent in January 2013 to 91.1 percent by the end of the year under review.
Telephone density or tele-density is the number of telephone connections for every hundred individuals living within an area. It varies widely across the nations and also between urban and rural areas within a country. Analysts said that telephone density has significant correlation with the per capita GDP of the area, adding that it is also used as an indicator of economic development of the country or specific region. Furthermore, the statistics showed that telecoms operators’ total installed capacity, which was 226.6m by January 2013, went up to about 248.4m by the end of the year.
It could also be deduced from the statistics that MTN, which recently reported revenues of N794bn in 2013 and paid N1.23trillion to government as taxes in the last 13 years, remained the largest mobile operator in the country, with over 56m mobile subscribers and 45 percent marketshare.
Globacom, owned by Mike Adenuga, oil magnate, followed with 21 percent market share and over 25m subscription; Airtel, with 24.8 million subscription controls 20 per cent of the market.
Etisalat, after five years of operations in the country has about 18 million subscribers and 14 percent market share.
The MNP statistics showed that in October, 8,105 subscribers ported out; 7,830 in November and 5,850 in December. In terms of porting in, 8, 112; 8, 242 and 6,962 subscribers ported into the networks in October, November and December respectively of the period under review.
The CDMA operators, including Visafone; Multilinks; Starcomms and Mtel, which started the year with about 14 million subscriptions lost about 6.35 million connected lines to end the year with 7.6 million.
Ben Uzor Jr
