The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic disruptions notwithstanding, Nigerians spent about N1.77tn on national calls and short messages in 2020, according to the analysis of data released by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
Punch reported that the document titled ‘2020 subscriber/network data report’ put total outgoing local and national traffic at 150,825,830,687.40 minutes.
According to Punch, the average tariff charged by the mobile networks as sighted on the NCC’s website stood at N11.5.
This puts the total cost of outgoing calls on the mobile networks during the period at N1.73tn.
According to the NCC, the total number of national SMS sent was 8,223,933,975.02. The NCC had pegged the cost of SMS at N4. Therefore, cost of sent SMS within the period totaled N32.89bn.
According to the commission, the total outgoing local and national traffic was 150,825,830,687.40 minutes while total incoming local and national traffic was 151,871,687,402.67 minutes.
MTN Nigeria had the highest total outgoing and incoming of 103,531,547,686 and 105,473,566,557 minutes respectively.
Airtel had total outgoing and incoming traffic of 41,888,554,009.00 and 41,869,399,065.00 minutes respectively.
Globacom had total outgoing and incoming traffic of 758,717,879.40 and 128,255.78 minutes respectively while 9mobile had total outgoing and incoming traffic of 3,522,412,570.00 and 4,415,048,371.89 minutes respectively.
SMILE had total outgoing and incoming traffic of 328,751,159.00 and 48,532,478.00 minutes respectively. NTEL had total outgoing and incoming traffic of 795,847,384.00 and 65,012,675.00 minutes respectively.
The commission said that total outgoing mobile international traffic for the year was 453,202,089.27 minutes while total incoming international traffic to mobile was 717,166,679.72 minutes.
MTN led the way with total outgoing traffic of 270,177,167 and incoming traffic of 264,977,868.6 minutes.
The NCC added that the total number of national SMS both sent and received in 2020 was 17,364,524,490.02, a 43.6 per cent decrease from 2019.
MTN recorded the highest count of SMS received, 6,290,889,268, and the highest number of SMS sent, 6,100,543,865.
Total number of international SMS sent for 2020 was 57,566,961 while the total number of SMS received was 229,173,132.
According to the NCC, the total number of international SMS sent increased by 2.4 per cent from 2019.
