Fixed telephony operators lose 50% of active lines in one year

Fixed telephone operators in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy by GDP, lost more than 56 percent of their active lines in the past one year, according to data from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

The protracted crisis engulfing the first national carrier, the Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL), has contributed immensely to the dearth of fixed-line services in the country.

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

Last year, the number of fixed telephone lines stood at 396,939 lines. This means that within a period of one year, the fixed operators lost 224,063 active lines. This also shows a decline of 56.45 percent 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 percent 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 percent 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. It is not all gloom and doom as the rising demand for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), especially from the enterprise side, is sparking off the resurgence of fixed-line telephony. Analysts are particularly optimistic that recent efforts by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to stimulate investment in broadband infrastructure deployment, as clearly defined in its recently approved national policy, will be the required catalyst needed to resuscitate Nigeria’s ailing fixed-line sub-sector.

VoIP is a form of communication that allows people to make phone calls over a broadband internet connection instead of typical analogue telephone lines. “There is still a market for fixed-line services in Nigeria in view of the efforts to strengthen the deployment of broadband infrastructure and the emergence of VoIP. “There are big businesses in the financial services, telecoms, oil and gas industries with huge number of employees scattered across countless branches. Increasingly, these businesses are demanding for cheaper fixed voice telephony to enable employees communicate with their counterparts in other branches effectively,” Vernon Van Rooyen, executive head, network operations, Vodacom Business, told BusinessDay in an interview.

According to him, businesses in the country can get access to advanced voice services over the internet at a cost-effective price, adding that this is a new growth area in Nigeria’s competitive telecoms market.