Nigeria’s newly released data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has seen a 4.59 percent jump in voice subscriptions and this is significant in the era of VoIP call services all over the place these days. Facebook’s main messaging services, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger control messaging globally and just a few years ago, they started introducing voice services and then to video conferencing and this took a toll on the revenue of many telcos globally. The second quarter to third quarter new voice subscriptions went from 196,242,456 to 205,252,058. This was contained in a report titled “Telecoms Data: Active Voice and Internet per State, Porting and Tariff Information release earlier this week by the NBS.
The 100-page report gives an investigation covering the quantity of active subscribers by state. It additionally gives information by telecom companies, with classes covering active voice subscription, active Internet membership, examination of dynamic voice memberships by network, numbers ported and tariffs among others.
MTN being the biggest mobile network operator in Nigeria go the biggest share of the new voice subscribers and then Airtel and Glo in second and third places respectively. MTN got 78,754,855 in Q2 compared to 82,635,083 in Q3 while GLO in the same period went from 52,573 ,907 to 54,254,550 between the second and third quarters of 2020 according to the report. Airtel came in from 52,462,347 to 55,250,798, in this category and 9mobile went from 12 111 674 to 12 729 222. It is worthy of note that GLO is the second biggest telecom operator in Nigeria.
The drop in voice revenue has led telecom companies to come up with ways to sell data services which are required to make call from social media apps. Data prices in Nigeria are still considered fair but the billing is where many have an axe to grind with the operators. But as the explanation goes, we live in the HD and 4k era and it costs resources to process videos in high quality. The Federal Government of Nigeria through the Federal Ministry of Communications and Digital Economy is urging operators to further the cost of acquiring data so many more can come online. 4G services are now available in major cities across Nigeria but throughput is where the challenge is. You see the 4G sign on part of your phone screen but when you test sometimes, you get less than 2Mbps. 4G speeds at a download minimum should range between 5Mbps and 12Mbps.
Now the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) and the mobile network operators (MNOs) are working to increase 5G tests across Nigeria.
The data NBS relied on mainly came from the NCC and was published after verification.
