Nigeria Now Has 39 Millilion Redundant Telephone Lines

THE inactive lines currently on the telecommunications operators’ networks have reduced to 39,252,177 as at June 2014, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has said.

This is contained in the commission’s `Monthly Subscriber Data’ made available to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday in Lagos.

The data showed that the inactive Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards reduced by 7,685,183 in June, as against the 46,937,360 recorded in the month of May.

Moreso, connected numbers on the telecoms networks stood at 170,032,880 in the month under review, reducing by 8,086,538 from the 178,119,418 recorded in May.

From the 170,032,880 connected lines in June, the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) operators connected 165,716,078 customers, hence losing 7,981,209 subscribers from the 173,697,287 lines connected in May.

The Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks connected 3,974,106 subscribers, as against 4,081,300 recorded in the month of May, thereby losing 107,194 customers in June.

The Fixed Wired/Wireless operators recorded 342,686 connected numbers in June, as against 340,831 in May, hence adding 1,865 numbers to their networks.

Furthermore, the active subscribers on the telecoms networks in the month of June stood at 130,780,703, reducing by 401,355 as against the 131,182,058 telecoms users in May.

The GSM networks had a share of 128,536,850 from the June 130,780,703 active lines, as against the 128,896,631 functional numbers in May, hence losing 359,781 active lines in June.

The CDMA operators shared a total of 2,061,458 active subscribers, losing 45,931 from the 2,107,389 active lines recorded in May.

The Fixed Wired/Wireless networks recorded 182,395 active lines in June, adding 4,357 customers to the 178,038 active subscribers in May.

The teledensity of the telecoms networks reduced to 93.41 per cent, hence shedding .29 per cent from the 93.70 per cent achieved in the month of May.

Teledensity implies the number of persons with access to telecoms services, as against a country’s population.

Teledensity is calculated based on population estimate of 140 million, against the active telephone subscribers.

The June subscriber data which showed a reduction of 8,086,538 from the connected lines in May implied that telecoms operators were not eager to accumulate more subscribers.

The reduction in inactive line showed that service providers were working to resuscitate dormant lines, instead of accumulating more lines that would soon go dormant.