According to Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC), the telcos in the country have a total of 120,969,740 mobile lines with 12,083,190 new subscribers added in February. In these numbers, active lives grew from 88,804,952 in January to 89,568,668 in February. This shows that SIM card registration has not undermined the rate of mobile lines activation in Nigeria, though that is too early to call. There is that fear that subscriber base will drop as the dealine looms, as was experienced by MTN in South Africa where it lost 4.7% of its user base in the exercise The total mobile lines is broken into GSM lines of 108,564,834 and CDMA lines of 12,404,906 lines. This shows that GSM is the leading platform with CDMA only enjoying marginal growth.
Nigeria will be moving into number portability which will enable anyone to change telcos while retaining the old number. So, people can practically have one number despite moving from one network to the other. Portability will possibly be another cost overlay for the telcos. This freedom can cause loss of market share to those that are not improving these services. Kenya and other African nations are going through the portability policy as well.
For more, visit NCC website and click February 2011 Subscriber Data Available
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