Nigeria’s active mobile subscriptions hit 198.9m

August 31, 2020

2 Min Read

By Victor Akindele

Active subscriptions for mobile telecommunications services in Nigeria across the networks of MTN, Globacom, Airtel, and 9mobile rose to 198.9 million in July. This was disclosed by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in its latest industry data released today.

The number of active mobile subscriptions in the preceding month stood at 195.9 million. This showed that the telecommunications operators added a total of 3.05 million new subscriptions in July.

With this, the country’s teledensity, which measures the number of active telephone connections per 100 inhabitants living within an area, also increased to 104.41 per cent. This is calculated based on an estimated 190 million population of the country.

According to the NCC’s report, MTN remained the largest mobile operator by the number of subscriptions in the country. In the month under review, the telco activated 1.59 million new lines, which brought its total active subscriptions to 80.3 million. Airtel overtook Globacom to become the second-largest operator as it added 1.24 million new subscriptions in the month. This brought its total subscriptions to 53.7 million. Globacom also activated 167, 855 new lines, bringing its customer base to 52.7 million.

9mobile, which had consistently lost subscribers bounced back in July as it added 51,656 new subscriptions in the month. This brought its total subscriptions to 12.16 million from 12.11 million it recorded in June.

While the mobile networks remained the main source of connectivity in the country, the NCC report showed that a few Nigerians are still on fixed-wired networks. According to the report, there were 107, 860 fixed-wired subscribers in the country as of July this year. Analysis of operators in this segment showed that 21^st Century was the main player in the fixed market as it accounted for, 96, 378, which is 89 per cent of the total subscriptions. MTN, through its fixed-wired service ‘MTN fixed’, had 7,502 customers, while Globacom (Glo Fixed) had 2,551 fixed customers. IpNX, the fourth player in the segment had 1,429 customers as of July.