Tuesday, 16 October 2012 00:00 By
Adeyemi Adepetun with Agency report Business Services - 
GLOBAL mobile subscription at the
end of 2011 reached six billion, according to a report by the United Nations
telecoms agency, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
The UN body responsible for global
telecommunications regulation said there are now more mobile phone
subscriptions in the world as people. The world population was nearing
seven billion people on Earth.
The study found almost one billion
subscriptions in China.
The report titled, “Measuring the
Information Society 2012”, looked at 155 countries, assessing their access to
and use of information and communication technology (ICT).
The ITU’s Head of data division,
Susan Teltscher, said: “We count Sim cards, not the number of devices or
people, so if one person has two Sim cards in one device, it counts as two
subscriptions; and we count monthly subscriptions as well.”
Presently and according to the
latest statistics from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), active
telephone subscription in Nigeria has hit 105.2 million. Out of this, the GSM
subscription accounted for the highest with 101.4 million subscriptions. The
troubled Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators have 3.35 million
subscriptions, while operators in fixed wired and wireless space shared 488,088
subscriptions.
Nigeria’s teledensity now stands at
75.2 per cent, that is the number of telephone users per every hundred
individuals living within a geographical area.
Speaking in Lagos, the former
Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Dr. Ernest Ndukwe predicted that mobile
subscriptions in Nigeria will record a steady growth of almost two million
users by the end of the year.
“Today, the figure for active
subscribers in the mobile networks is over 100 million lines and may surpass
105 million by end of December 2012. Indeed Nigeria has transited from what I
describe as the telecommunications dark ages before 2000 to a
telecommunications revolution age that has opened up new possibilities and
frontiers across our political social and economic landscape,” he said.
“The change levels in the industry
have remained breath-taking since 2001, when what is now commonly referred to
as Nigeria’s telecom revolution came about. Indeed no one was in a position to
predict in those early days, the full potential of the market and the speed at
which the Nigerian telecom network would grow”.
But in its study, the ITU said that
Sim cards used in a tablet or to access the Internet on a laptop computer had
not been taken into account.
The Geneva-based agency also said
almost two billion people - about one-third of the world’s population - had
been Internet users by the end of 2011.
The agency noted that in developed
countries, 70 per cent of the population was online, compared with 24 per cent
in developing regions, adding that there were almost twice as many mobile
broadband subscriptions globally as fixed broadband ones.
The director of ITU’s
Telecommunication Development Bureau, Brahima Sanou, said: “The surge in
numbers of mobile-broadband subscriptions in developing countries has brought
the internet to a multitude of new users.
“But despite the downward trend,
prices remain relatively high in many low-income countries.
“For mobile broadband to replicate
the mobile-cellular miracle and bring more people from developing countries
online, 3G network coverage has to be extended and prices have to go down even
further.”
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