NIN-SIM Linkage Policy Reduces Nigeria’ Mobile Subscriptions to 218M
In January this year, active mobile service subscriptions in Nigeria dropped by over 6 million to 218 million as telecom operators complied with the regulator’s directive to ban SIM cards.
The latest industry data released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) revealed that active subscriptions across the four mobile networks of MTN, Airtel, Globacom, and 9mobile stood at 224.4 million as of December 2023.
Read Also:
With the decline in actively connected lines recorded by the operators, the country’s teledensity, which measures the number of active telephone connections per 100 inhabitants living within an area, also declined to 100.75 in January 2024 from 103.66% recorded in December last year.
According to NCC, the teledensity is calculated based on a population estimate of 190 million.
Analysis of the industry data shows that the decline in the country’s mobile subscription database was caused mainly by MTN, which lost 7.2 million subscriptions in the month.
The company’s total active subscriptions, which stood at 87 million in December 2023, plunged to 79.7 million in January, according to NCC’s data.
Recall that MTN recently disclosed that it had disconnected 4.2 million lines following the NCC’s directive on NIN-SIM linkage.
