Africa’s Mobile Subscription Hits 280.58m

The African continent has recorded a total of 280.58 million mobile lines as at the end of December 2007.

Of this figure, sub-Saharan Africa registered 135.31 million mobile lines out of which 46.97 million were resident in Nigeria.

This shows that Nigeria has 34.72 percent of the total mobile lines in the sub-region.

The international standards body for telecommunications disclosed this in its African Telecommunication/ ICT Indicators 2008 report, which was released in Cairo, Egypt, on Saturday to mark the opening of ITU Telecom Africa 2008.

As at 2002, Africa's effective tele-density was put at 27.76 percent, while that of sub-Saharan Africa was put at 18.51 percent. Nigeria's effective tele-density, put at 27.28 percent, was close to Africa's average.

Tele-density measures the number of lines in a country in relation to 100 members of the population.

Feeding on suppressed demand, the Nigerian mobile telecommunications market has been growing since the licensing of three digital mobile operators in January 2001.

The market has further been liberalized by the licensing of two additional GSM operators, while four other fixed wireless operators have obtained Unified Access Service Licences that permit them to render mobile services.

However, the market has been bedeviled recently by poor quality of services as operators overload their networks beyond their installed capacities.

The operators have however attributed much of the problems to environmental issues, especially power supply. Punch Newspaper