Inactive telephone lines now 40.06 million – NCC

The number of inactive telephone lines in the country is now 40,069,640, according to latest figures from the Nigerian Communications Commission.

The figures showed that as of January 2013, the Global System for Mobile communications operators had 26,886,533 inactive lines, while 11,150,505 belonged to the Code Division Multiple Access operators, the remaining 2,032,602 were fixed wired/wireless lines.

Out of the 154,562,024 connected lines, only 114,492,384 are active as of the date, according to the NCC.

For GSM, only 111,195,207 of the 138,081,740 connected lines are currently active; in the CDMA category, only 2,890,955 of the 14,041,460 connected lines are active; while only 406,222 of the connected 2,438,824 fixed wire/wireless lines are active.

Airtel, MTN, Globacom and Etisalat are the GSM service providers, while Starcomms, Visafone, Multi-Links and ZOOMobile operate the CDMA technology.

As of December 2012, the industry had 113,195,951 active telephone lines out of the total 151,714,650 connected; meaning that over 38.5 million lines were inactive then.

This, therefore, represents a four per cent rise in the number of inactive telephone lines between December 2012 and January 2013.

The number of active telecoms subscribers in the country grew by 1,296,433 between December 2012 and January 2013. This represents a growth of 1.145 per cent from the 113,195,951 recorded in December last year.

This puts the active subscriber base at 114,492,384 as of January 2013 with the struggling CDMA operators contributing nothing to the growth.

Statistics showed a drop of 58,007 in the subscriber base of the CDMA operators from 2,948,562 to 2,890,555 in the period under review.

There were 154,562,024 connected GSM, CDMA and fixed lines in the country as of January 2013, compared to 151,714,650 in December 2012, according to the NCC.

The installed capacity of all the telecoms providers was put at 226,611,747 in January this year as against 211,808,092 in December last year.

The teledensity was put at 81.78 per cent for January 2013 as against 80.85 per cent last year.

Teledensity is the percentage of connected lines in relation to the population at a given period of time, and its growth is proportionate to the growth in the subscriber base.

Figures from PriceWaterHouse Coopers, which was commissioned by the NCC to put together statistics on the industry in 2012, showed that Nigeria’s outgoing and incoming on-net and off-net calls totalled 22.3 billion minutes in 2012; while 1.8 billion text messages were recorded within the same period.

Similarly, the report showed that while the total call times recorded increased by over five billion minutes from 17 billion in 2011 to 22.3 billion at the end of 2012, SMS volumes also increased by three million, rising from 1.5 billion to 1.8 billion during the same period.





-- Punch