TELECOMMUNICATIONS operators plying their trade in the nation's telecommunications landscape may have lost about N35.7 billion directly or indirectly to telephone lines that have become inactive in the country in the first three months of the year.According to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) , though GSM operators grew their subscribers to 119.4 million in the first quarter, only 94.1 million of the lines are active as at March 2012. But the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators, which seems to be badly affected had connected lines put at 13.1 million, with only four millions of the lines remaining active as at first quarter of the year, while the fixed wireless connected lines stood at 2.3 million, only about 599, 335 of the lines seem to be working.However, NCC statistics put the country's active lines at 99.1 million as at the period under review.Specifically, while 94.5 million of the country's 99.4 million connected GSM lines are active, the remaining 24.9 million GSM lines are inactive. The 94.5 million active GSM lines are shared among MTN, Glo, Airtel, and Etisalat.The CDMA operators such as Starcomms, Visafone, Multi-Links, and ZOOMmobile had lost over nine million lines as at March 2012. In the case of the fixed telephony, though it went down in February to 578,152 lines from 688,333 in January, but added 21,183 lines by March of the same period.For the fixed wire/wireless telephone lines, only 599,335 of the 2.3 million total fixed lines remain active in Nigeria.While the total connected lines increase from 124.8 million in December 2011 to 134.9 million in March 2012, inactive lines also climbed within the same period from 28.9 million to 35.7 million.It can be deduced that between last quarter of 2011 and first quarter of 2012, well over 6.85 million lines had become inactive.Going by the Average Revenue Per User figure for the Nigerian telecoms industry which operators had put at N1, 000 a month, telecoms analysts said telecoms operators might have lost about N35.7 billion to inactive telephone lines within the period under review.ARPU is a financial performance benchmark in the telecoms industry that measures the average monthly revenue generated per customer.A concrete look into the country's CDMA operators, which have been struggling to stay in form, revealed that they lost about 587, 372 telephone subscriptions on their network in the first quarter of 2012 running January through March.With ARPU pegged at N1000, it was gathered that the operators lost an estimated N587.4 million which could have accrued to them as voice revenue if the loss in subscriptions had not been recorded on their networks.The latest industry statistics for the month of March from the NCC, showed that, while active subscriptions on all the CDMA networks stood at 4,601,070 in December 2011, the subscriptions declined to 4,410,141 in January, 4,031,820 in February and 4,013,698 in March.In the first three months of January, February and March, the operators thus recorded a decline of 587,372 telephone lines leading to erosion of potential voice revenue.Telecoms experts gave so may reasons why a telephone lines could become inactive, among which include; failure by the subscribers to pay, maintain or service the line within an agreed term and specific period; poor or dysfunctional wireless equipment; consistent network outage from the side of the service providers could frustrate the subscriber and subsequently lead to dumping of such telecommunications network.
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