Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, has said that the telecom sector contributed N2.272 trillion to the country’s Gross Domestic Product, GDP, last year. The commission said that the year 2020 growth statistics and major regulatory initiatives and policies undertaken by the NCC continued to put the industry on a consistent path of growth while keeping the telecommunications sector resilient to support the national economy, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The report further said that official telecom industry data obtained from the National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, showed that telecoms contribution to the Gross Domestic Product, GDP, increased to over 14.30 percent as at the second Quarter of 2020.
In financial value, the 14.30 percent translates to N2.272 trillion in Q2, 2020, whereas, telecoms contribution as at December 2019, was 10.60 percent. Also, telecoms investment continued to grow in leaps and bounds in 2020 beyond $70 billion. Active mobile voice subscribers increased from 184 million in December 2019 to 208 million by October 2020.
This represents an additional 24 million active mobile lines accessed by Nigerians across mobile networks from December 2019, to October 2020. Accordingly, teledensity (the total number of telephone lines per hundred people in an area) increased from 96.76 percent in December 2019 to 108.94 percent by October 2020.
NCC’s regulatory activities also resulted in increased connectivity in the country. From 126 million in December 2019, Internet subscriptions rose impressively 152.9 million as of October, 2020. In the same vein, broadband penetration maintained an upward swing to 45.93 percent in October 2020, up from 37.80 percent in 2019. Equally, Mobile Number Portability, MNP, service continued to offer wider options of service for telecoms consumers in 2020. In the year under review, 158,128 telecom consumers ported their lines between January-October 2020 as against over 120,000 lines that were ported in 2019…
The report stated that the increase in MNP service usage was due to increased public education and awareness by the commission’s head office and its zonal offices, as they intensified awareness on the availability, usage and benefits of MNP across geo-political zones. Mobile number portability is a service introduced by NCC on mobile networks which allows telecoms consumers to switch from their current network to another preferred network, without changing their mobile number, when they feel a need to do so. The commission was able to successfully resolve over 98 percent of the total consumer complaints received from telecoms consumers via the NCC Toll-Free Number 622, NCC Consumer Portal, social media platforms and written complaints. Subscriptions by telecoms consumers to the NCC’s Do-Not-Disturb (DND) 2442 service reached over 30 million in 2020 compared with 22 million in 2019.
