Mobile phone users: active users decline in Nigeria

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on Saturday said that active lines in the nation’s telecommunications industry reduced to 150,660,631 in the month of September.

The commission made this known in its Monthly Subscriber Data.

According to NAN, active lines in the country which was 151,018,624 for the month of August, reduced to 150,660,631 as at September 2015.

With the reduction in number, service providers in the industry lost a total of 357,993 subscribers. And it may be a result of the instruction by NCC given to operators in August, to deactivate improperly registered SIM cards.

According to the data, the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) network which had 148,708,160 in August, was now left with 148,427,043 active customers in September.

The GSM network operators, which comprises of MTN, Airtel, Globacom and Etisalat, lost 276,117 users, in the month under review.

The Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators lost 83,926 active users, as their 2,125,941 customers recorded in the month of August reduced to 2,042,015 in September.

However, the monthly subscriber data showed that the Fixed Wired/Wireless networks’ consumers increased to 191,573 as against 189,523 in August, hence, they added 2,050 customers to their networks in the month of September.

The chart revealed that the teledensity of the country’s telecommunications industry also reduced by .26 per cent, from 107.87 per cent in the month of August, to 107.61 per cent in September.

The teledensity statistics measure the percentage of a country’s population with access to telecommunications services, as determined from the subscriber base.

Nigeria’s teledensity is currently calculated by the NCC on a population of 140 million people.

The reduction in the number of active subscribers in the month of September is as a result of the