Today, the country can also boast of achieving 95 per cent teledensity. Teledensity is the number of telephone 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.

Indeed, The Guardian checks yesterday, showed that as at October 2013, Nigeria had 121.8 million active subscriptions and about the 12 months after, there has been over 80 per cent growth to the tune of over 133.3 million.

Within the same period, the number of connected lines also moved up. As at September 2013, Nigeria had 158.2 million connected lines, which according to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) statistics is now 177.5 million.

In specific, the GSM technology with operators including MTN Nigeria; Globacom; Airtel and Etisalat increased their collective subscriptions from 118.4 million to 130.8 million. Unfortunately, the CDMA and the Fixed Wired/Wireless maintained a downward profile moving from 2.4 million to 2.2 million and 362,392 to 190,507 respectively.

Though within the period about 15, 000 subscribers may have exchanged their operators through the Mobile Number Portability, MTN Nigeria, whose parent body in South Africa complained last week of the arm experiencing lull in its growth, still controls 45 per cent of the Nigerian market with about 58.2 million subscribers.

MTN claimed that the decline was largely impacted by regulatory restrictions and even instability in Nigeria’s northern areas where an insurgency by Boko Haram militants is taking place.

“MTN reported encouraging results for the third quarter… however, performance was impacted by continued aggressive competition and stringent regulatory requirements,” said MTN’s Chief Executive Officer, Sifiso Dabengwa, in a statement.

“Nigerian operation faced a challenging regulatory environment resulting in lower-than-expected growth,” he added.

Though Dabengwa described the regulatory restrictions relating to the dominant-operator as having led to a “marginal decline” in the subscriber base in Africa’s most populous country, he, however, said the situation “will affect second-half revenue growth.”

Meanwhile, Globacom, which recently displaced Airtel as the second largest operator in Nigeria still maintained the position with 21 per cent market share and 27.5 million subscribers. Airtel controls 19 per cent market share and has 25.5 million subscribers with Etisalat gradually picking up at 15 per cent market share and about 20 million subscribers.

The CDMA, whose only major player remains Visafone continue to struggle to remain afloat. Visafone currently has about 154, 464.

The Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Eugene Juwah recently blamed the downward fortunes of the CDMA on poor capitalization stressing that most of the operators that failed to even return borrowed capital to the bank and subsequently couldn’t get more financing.

Guardian; Tuesday, 28 October 2014 19:40
Written by Adeyemi Adepetun

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