The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has said that in line with the Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) card registration exercise mandated by it, mobile operators as of December 2022 had registered 301,283,030 subscribers in the country.
NCC said MTN had registered 123.5 million; Globacom, 65.4 million; Airtel, 64.8 million; 9mobile, 46.1 million; Smile, 966,066 and nTel, 236,495.
The telecoms regulator, in its 2022 Subscriber/Network Data Yearly report, released on 10th August,2023, said the total yearly active voice subscription for mobile (GSM) segment increased from 195.1 million subscriptions as of December 2021 to 222.2 million a year after. This indicated a 13.88 per cent gain in GSM active voice subscriptions year-on-year.
In terms of market share for GSM active voice subscriptions, NCC claimed that MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9mobile each recorded 89,016,678; 60,290,012; 60,065,904 and 12,852,706 subscribers respectively. In that order, MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9mobile had 40.06 per cent, 27.13 per cent, 27.03 per cent and 5.78 per cent share of the mobile GSM market respectively.
The NCC said the growth in voice subscription was ultimately driven by the mobile (GSM) market segment, which accounted for 99.8 per cent, while Fixed Wired/Wireless and VOIP market segments each accounted for 0.1 per cent each of the entire market share in terms of technology deployment.
Regional active voice subscription showed that South-South had 32.6 million subscriptions, South-West, 63.7 million, South-East, 21.4 million; North-West, 40.8 million; North-East, 21.3 million and North-Central, 42.5 million.
Further analysis of the report showed that the total number of national Short Message Service (SMS) sent and received as of December 2022 was 25,928,704,567. This is an increase of 28.82 per cent from that of the total SMS sent and received in the year 2021 that stood at 20,126,551,822. There was a 48.84 per cent increase in the number of SMS sent in the year 2022 compared to 2021.
Conversely, the year 2022 count of received SMS also increased by 11.06 per cent higher than that of 2021. In 2022, MTN recorded the highest count of SMS received and sent, which stood at 8,738,690,150 and 8,323,722,485 respectively.
In the period, Glo sent 3.63 billion, received on the network 777.2 million; Airtel network sent 1.88 billion, received 2.1 billion; 9mobile sent 234.8 million and received 235 million, while Smile Communications sent 173,607 and received 766,588.
The international SMS sent as of December 2022 stood at 59,571,547 while the total number of SMS received was 459,329,782.
Specifically, MTN sent 22.5 million and received 14.1 million; Glo sent 224,493 and received 3.63 million; Airtel sent 35.8 million and received 380.7 million; 9mobile sent 1.39 million and received 60.7 million, while Smile sent 2,013 and received 77,288 international SMS.
According to NCC, Nigeria’s teledensity increased from 102.40 per cent as of December 2021 to 116.60 per cent by December 31, 2022, stressing that active subscriptions also increased by 13.86 per cent, indicating that over a tenth of persons per 100 subscribers were connected year-on-year.
The Guardian
