Nigeria - 53 million lines

Nigeria: Country Hits 53 Million Phone Lines

The Nigerian Communication Commission(NCC), has disclosed that the nation recorded 53,332,149 million active lines on the network as at end of June 2008, adding that consequently, this figure has pushed Nigeria's teledensity to 38.09per cent, which represents about 38 phones to 100 of Nigerian population of 140 million.

The vice chairman and chief executive, NCC, Engr. Ernest Ndukwe, who announced the latest figures at the weekend during the Consumer Parliament held at Excellence Hotel, Ogba, Ikeja, in Lagos, however, frowned at the attitude of service providers for not providing enough customer care centres for consumers to easily and quickly resolve their complaints.

Arising from the submissions of subscribers during the session, Ndukwe said a situation where only very few customer care centres exist, and are far flung from the consumers, is no longer acceptable to the Commission.

According to him, none of the operators is doing well in this regard and that customer care centres must be available in all cities, as well as in various communities in the country. He suggested not only must such centres be well manned, but must also be fully accessible, because it will defeat the purpose if a subscriber would have to travel long distances and suffer delays to resolve issues with the operator.

The NCC boss informed the operators and the consumers in attendance that the Commission is coming up with minimum standards with respect to what each operator must do to ensure that customer care centres are available and accessible, nationwide, advising phone users on the need to use approved handsets, as the quality of phones in use contributes to the quality of service provided, especially now that the market is filled with many types of handsets from various sources.

He stressed that some of the handsets have low amplification internally, thus degrading the service, unless the user is very close to a base station, while others have low quality earphones which make reception very difficult. In those cases, he said the user will be blaming the network, while the problem is from the handset.

According to a statement from the NCC, the Commission would soon publish details of approved handsets in the print media, but that the list of these sets is available on the NCC website.