Mobile voice subscriber snapshot for August; Vodafone, tiGO lose

Vodafone and tiGO dropped some of their subscribers for the month of August according to statistics released by the industry regulator, National Communications Authority (NCA).

Vodafone, which has the second largest market share in the highly competitive mobile telephony industry in the country, dropped as much as 60,721 subscribers for the month under review to end the month with 6,688,783.

In the preceding month, Vodafone, which has had some major challenges with its network which culminated in the delivery of poor services to subscribers, had a total subscriber base of 6,749,504.

tiGO also recorded a decrease in its subscriber base to end the month under review with a figure of 4,015,946.

The company, which has also been slow with its media and marketing campaigns as compared to the other players in the industry, shed off about 21,266 subscribers, having held 4,037,212 subscribers at the close of the month of July.

tiGo has the third largest market share in the industry.

Gainers for August

MTN, which has dominated the industry as the market leader for more than a decade, saw a rise in its subscriber numbers for the month of August.

According to the NCA report, the company, which transformed as Spacefon then to Areeba and now MTN, recorded 110,042 in the period under review to record a total subscriber number of 13,541,961.

For the month of July, MTN, which has also had some challenges with its network, boasted 13,431,919 subscribers.

The fourth largest telco in terms of market share, Airtel, also witnessed an increase in its subscriber base by 97,016 to end August 2014 with a total figure of 3,756,547.

In July the company, which seemed to be more aggressive with its marketing campaigns, had a total subscriber base of 3,659,531.

Glo, which has been battling to make a mark in the industry, experienced an increase of 35,711 in its subscriber base to end August with 1,404,426.

From July’s subscriber figure of 122,356, Expresso, which has struggled since its inception, closed August with 123,825.

MNP in three years

Ghana’s Mobile Number Portability (MNP) marked three years since its inception. MNP is a permanent system which allows mobile telephony customers to move from one service provider to another whilst retaining their old mobile number. 

According to the NCA, in its third year, 838,202 requests had been completed, showing an increase of 87 per cent over the second year. From the launch date of July 7, 2011 until the end of the third year, 1,655,404 porting requests had been completed. 

The number of completed ports represents about six per cent of the total active mobile subscription base. This far exceeds any other implementation of MNP in sub-Saharan Africa, the markets which are most directly comparable to Ghana. 

The milestone of one million successful ports was achieved on October 12, 2013, and was celebrated by three of the mobile networks, each giving one of their customers who ported at that time 1,000 Ghana Cedis worth of credit per month for one year. Additionally, Porting Access Ghana Limited, operators of the central porting system, gave each of the lucky winners a smartphone on which they could use their newly-ported numbers.

What’s missing?

In spite of the various successes in the mobile voice telephony industry, quality of service remains low.

On an annual basis, the NCA is forced to fine the operators for poor service delivery.

A few months ago this year, Vodafone was forced to desist from adding on new subscribers to its existing numbers because of the poor quality of services it rendered to its customers.

According to the NCA, call drops and delays in call set-up, among other things, which had pushed subscribers on the network to complain were unacceptable.

Some industry analysts have concluded that the nature of competition was too keen among the operators and therefore, they were more committed to engaging in marketing activities to promote their brands rather than investing in network expansion to improve quality of service.