Fixed Telephones Ring Distress as Numbers Plummet

Nigerian Communications Commissions (NCC) at the weekend released her latest data showing that fixed telephone operators lost more than 56 per cent of their active lines in the past one year.

According to the NCC, the active fixed telephone lines in the country were 172,876 lines as at the end of April.

A year before, the number of fixed telephone lines stood at 396,939 lines.

That means that within a period of one year, the fixed operators lost 224,063 active lines.

This also shows a decline of 56.45 per cent in the number of active fixed telephone lines.

Within the same period of one year, Global System for Mobile Communications operators known as GSM operators gained 10.63 million new subscribers. This shows 9.14 per cent increase in the subscriber base of GSM operators.

Other marginal operators within the industry pushed the total number of subscriber lines in the country to 129,391,392 lines as of April.

This means that the total number of subscription lines increased by 10.03 million within a period of one year. It was 119,356,665 lines a year before. This shows an increase of 7.76 per cent in the total number of subscribers within the period of one year.

The decline of fixed telephony in the country is not helped by the rapid decline in the fortunes of operators that had hitherto offered fixed wireless telephony services.

NCC  listed some of the fixed operators as inactive. The operators consist of Starcomms Limited, Reliance Telecomms, Intercellular Nigeria Limited, MTS First Communications and Disc Communications.

Others are WiTEL, O’Net (Odua Telecom), Rainbownet Limited, Monarch Communications, XS Broadband, Webcom and of course, the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited.

Over the years, NITEL had been the major provider of fixed services in the country.