GSM SUBSCRIBERS HIT 99M -NCC

By NBF News

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)'s  latest statistics on telecommunication in the country showed that the number of active telephone subscribers in the country stood at 99.14 million as at the end of March, 2012.

According to information on the industry's regulator's website, the figure represents the combined active subscriptions obtained on Global System for Mobile Communications networks (GSM), the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and the fixed wired/wireless networks in the country.

The latest record revealed by the NCC showed that active subscriptions which stood at 95.88 million in December, 2011, increased to 96.15 million and 96.61 million in January and February, 2012, respectively.

The commission also noted that the networks in March pooled a total of 2.53 million new telephone lines bringing the number of active telephone lines on the various networks to 99.14 million.

Breakdown of the 99.14 million lines as at March indicated that while the major GSM companies had 94.53 million active subscriptions, the CDMA recorded 4.01 million while fixed line operators only had 599,335 lines on their networks.

Although the active subscriptions stood at 99.14 million as at March, but the actual number of connected lines on all the networks was 134.91 million.

The wide margin between the active lines and the actual connected lines could mean that about 35.74 million telephone lines are redundant or inactive.