Business
Body Explains Rise In Inactive Lines
The Chairman, Africa Information and Communications Technology Alliance (AfICTA), Mr Jimson Olufuye, said competition was partly responsible for the 40.4 million inactive lines in Nigeria’s telecommunications industry as at November 2012.
The statistics indicated that inactive subscribers on networks of telecom operators in November 2012 rose to 40.4million from 28.5million in October 2012.
Olufuye, also Chief Executive Officer of Kontemporary, said that many subscribers discarded their old Subscriber Identification Module (SIM) cards because it had become cheaper to get new ones.
According to him, a SIM card user may find out that buying a new card will give him internet access, along with voice communication, and decide to discard one and go for another.
‘’It shows that the communications sector is alive,’’ he said, noting that subscribers were responding to trends in the industry.
He said that telecom operators should improve on the quality of services they render, so that subscribers would not continue to leave their networks.
The AfICTA chairman said that the Mobile Number Portability service, billed to begin in the first quarter of the year, will reduce the volume of idle lines.
He, however, said that some other lines became idle because they were used for nefarious activities and discarded.
Chief Executive Officer of Teledom Group, Mr Emmanuel Ekuwem, also charged operators to render competitive services, so that they would not lose customers and revenue.
He told newsmen that the increasing number of inactive lines would affect the revenue of operators.
The subscriber data revealed that though there were 150.7million connected lines in November 2012, only 110.3 million were active in the industry.
A breakdown showed that the Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) network had a total of 27.4 million dormant lines.
Also, the mobile section of the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) had a total of 10.9 million inactive lines, while the Fixed Wired/Wireless network had about two million dormant lines.