Telecoms: How Glo Led Others Last Year – NBS

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has said telecommunications service provider, Globacom, was the catalyst of the growth witnessed in Nigeria’s telecommunications industry in the third quarter of last year.

According to the research agency, the sector grew in the quarter owing to data subscriptions which leapt by 23 percent year-on-year to berth at 151,063,413 million subscribers at the end of September 2020 as opposed to the corresponding period of 2019 which recorded 122,792,291.

Globacom, NBS said, achieved a 33.2 percent growth in its internet subscriber base between September 2019, and September 2020, with MTN coming second with a 24.5 percent growth during the period under review. Airtel came a distant third with a 21.4 per cent growth year on year.

The agency’s data, however, indicated that the fourth mobile network operator, 9mobile, suffered a decline during the same period with a dismal 14 percent slide in its data subscriptions from available figures between September 2019 and last September.

Industry analysts contend that Glo data services gained the leap because of its backbone of high-capacity international submarine cable, Glo-1 which is solely owned by the network.

Glo-1 is the harbinger of unprecedented seamless bandwidth from Europe to Nigeria and across other West African countries.

Credit: thenationonlineng.net