Active mobile subscription hit 99.14 million, says NCC

Ben Uzor Jr

The total number of active telephone subscriptions in Nigeria has reached 99.14 million as at the end of March, 2012, according to latest statistics from the telecoms industry regulator, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC). Industry analyst who spoke with Business Day yesterday say the figure which represents the combined active subscriptions obtained on Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) networks, the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and the fixed wired/wireless networks in the country clearly shows that there still exist tremendous opportunities in the voice segment of Nigeria’s highly competitive market.

According to the industry analysts, growth will indeed continue, predicting that the country’s mobile penetration rate was expected to reach 82 percent by 2015. With a population of 167 million, according to the National Population Commission (NPC), and over 99 million mobile phone subscriptions, about 68 million people still do not have access to telephony services. This figure is subjective considering the issue of multiple subscriptions. Majority of the Nigerians without access to telephony reside in rural communities. Industry analysts say telecoms operators must begin to channel more infrastructure investment to the relatively untapped rural markets so as to open up new business opportunities and increase revenues.

Pyramid Research had earlier predicted that Nigeria’s telecoms market will expand by 6 percent over the next five year on the back of telcos’ rural expansion drive. Besides, telcos have in the last decade subsequent to the sector’s successfully deregulation raised the subscriber base from 400, 000 active lines in 2001 to the current 96.6 million active subscriptions. According to data derived from NCC, active subscriptions, which stood at 95.88 million at the December, 2011, increased to 96.15 million, 96.61 million in January and February, 2012 respectively. The networks in March pooled a total of 2.53 million new telephone lines bringing the number of active lines on the various networks to a whopping 99.14 million.

Further analysis of the 99.14 million as at March, which is the latest official data for the industry, showed that while the GSM firms comprising MTN, Globacom, Airtel and Etisalat had 94.53 million active subscriptions; the CDMAs such as Visafone, Starcomms, Multi-Links and the distressed Zoom Mobile had 4.01 million and fixed line operators only had 599,335 lines ont6heri networks. Official industry data showed that though the active subscriptions stood at 99.14 million as at March, the actual number of connected on all the networks was 134.91 million. It was gathered that wide margin between the active lines and the actual connected lines it is safe to conclude that 35.74 telephone lines are redundant or inactive.

Also, the data also showed that teledensity in the country has also increased as it has direct relationship with the growth in telephone subscriptions, increasing from 68.68 in January to 69.01 in February and in March, 2012, it moved up to 70.82.Teledensity is the percentage of the number of phone users per population at a given period of time and its growth is proportional to the growth in the subscriber base. Another highlight of the data is the installed capacity of the operators, which is the total number of telephone lines that the operators can accommodate on their networks at a given period of time. As March, 2012, the operators had total installed capacity of 176.66 million lines. The figure stood at 173.63 million lines and 178.17 million lines for January and February respectively.