Nigeria’s Teledensity reaches 97.8%, adds 2.4m new Mobile Subscribers

Nigeria’s teledensity rose to 97.8 percent even as the country’s mobile subscription grew by 2.4 million additional lines between September and November 2014. 

 

Teledensity is the number of mobile 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. Telephone density has significant correlation with the per capita GDP of the area. It is also used as an indicator of economic development of the country or specific region.

 

 According to statistics from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the country’s total connected lines grew from 184.1 million in September to 186.5 million as at November, while the active lines also moved from 134.5 million to 136.6 million within the same period of review. As usual, the quartet of GSM operators, including MTN, Globacom, Airtel and Etisalat, continued to dominate the market, recording 182.4 million connected lines and 134 million active subscriptions. 

It was, however, a mixed fortune for the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators. The CDMA technology, which is majorly been championed by Visafone Communications in Nigeria had 3.7 million connected lines in September but grew to 3.8 million in November 2014.

 But the active subscriptions fluctuated, recording 2.4 million in September; 2.35 million in October and 2.41 million in November. For the fixed wired/wire- less operators, it recorded 363, 233 million connected lines but only 183, 555 are active. 

Though, Nigeria is estimated to have about 180 million people, the country’s telephone subscription base seem to have surpassed the populace. It must, however, be said that majority of Nigerians due to the poor telecommunications services, as occasioned by drop calls; unsolicited text messages; connection flaws; illegal credit deductions; incomplete calls, among others, have increased the profile of the country’s multi-SIM nature, where majority of subscribers operate two to three networks on the go.