Nigeria’s active mobile telephone subscription has surged to 189 million in August, representing about 1.5 million higher than the 187.5 million recorded in the preceding month.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) gave this figure in its just published industry statistics
A breakdown of the NCC”s statistics shows that active mobile subscriptions across the networks of MTN, GLobacom, Airtel, and 9mobile showed that that the August subscription represented the highest level of subscription in the last five months. In March, the mobile network operators recorded 192,413,613 subscription rate.
A further analysis of the industy regulator’s report reflected that in the month under review, the nation’s teledensity rose to 99.18% from March 2019. Teledensity is calculated based on a population estimate of 190 million, up from 140 million..
According to the NCC’s data, MTN, which is the largest telecom operator by subscriber number gained 9,598 new subscriptions in the month, thereby bringing its total active customer database to 73.1 million.
Similarly, Globacom added 845,467 new subscriptions in August to retain its position as the second-largest operator. The telco’s active customer database rose to 51.9 million at the end of the month.
Also, Airtel activated a total of 558,787 new lines in the month under review to record 50.8 million total subscriptions while 9mobile registered 113,087 new subscriptions, thus raising the telco’s total subscriptions to 13.02 million from the 12.9 million it recorded in the previous month.
With the growth recorded by the operators, the country’s teledensity, which measures the number of active telephone connections per 100 inhabitants living within an area, also increased to 99.18 percent from 98.39 percent recorded in July.
It would be recalled that since the Federal Government’s initiative on integrating a subscriber SIM card with the National Identification Number (NIN), the mobile network operators (MNOs) have reported decline in new SIM registrations.
Industry statistics indicated that the exercise caused the operators about 20 million reduction in subscriptions between December 2020 and April 2021.
For instance, active mobile subscriptions across the four networks, which stood at 207.5 million as of November 2020, plunged to 186.6 million by May this year.
