Over 37m telephone lines are inactive in Nigeria; NCC reveals a declining use of activated lines

The monthly subscriber data of telecommunication operators shows that there were 37,038,204  inactive telephone lines on operators’ networks as at July, 2012. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), in a statement on Tuesday, showed that the inactive lines increased by 3,366,204, above the 33,672,000 recorded in June, 2012.
Available data revealed that although the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) mobile network had a total of 124,266,618 connected lines, only 99,474,080 lines were active.

The mobile section of the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) had 10,350,537 as against 13,802,905 connected lines and 3,452,368 active CDMA network users.

The Fixed Wired/Wireless network, with a total of 2,394,139 connected lines in July, had an active subscriber base of 449,010, with the number of unused lines at 1,945,129.

Installed capacity on the GSM (mobile), CDMA (mobile) and the Fixed Wired/Wireless networks increased to 210,846,910, as against 208,659,327 in June.

Installed capacity refers to the total infrastructure that a network put in place to accommodate a certain number of telephone lines, without resulting to congestion or poor network quality at a particular period of time.

The GSM networks have an installed capacity of 181,160,659 to accommodate their 124,266,618 connected lines.

The CDMA installed a capacity of 18,400,000 for the 13,802,905 while the Fixed Networks installed 11,286,251 capacities for the connected 2,394,139 lines.

Teledensity of Nigeria’s telecommunications industry climbed to 73.88 per cent in July, compared to 73.12 per cent in June.

Teledensity measures the percentage of a country's population that has access to telecommunications services as determined by the subscriber base. Nigeria's teledensity is currently calculated by NCC on a population of 140 million people.

The Subscriber Data showed that although operators were working to increase subscriber base, some SIM card holders would buy and not use the SIM cards.

Operators’ revenue increase might also be hampered with a continued increase in inactive lines or users.