Cell phone penetration 65.65 percent, says NTA
KATHMANDU, APR 21 -
The penetration rate of the country’s cellular mobile phone has reached 65.65 percent as of mid-February. Latest data at the Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) show that there are 17.39 million mobile users in the country.
The country’s telecom service penetration rate has gone up to 73.88 percent, with the total subscriber base hitting 19.58 million in three service categories—fixed line telephone, mobile (GSM and CDMA), limited mobility and satellite phone. Compared to other voice services, GSM is the main segment of the domestic telecom market.
For a long time now, the government has been planning to bring in new mobile service providers through the unified telecom licence regime to create a competition in the mobile service market.
Ncell’s total number of mobile users has reached 9.55 million, according to the NTA. Similarly, Nepal Telecom has 8.59 million customers, including 7 million subscribers in its GSM mobile segment. As an impact of the heavy growth in the subscriber base in the last few years, the number of new customers subscribing to telecom services has declined.
As per an NTA report, six telecom companies—NT, Ncell, United Telecom Limited, Smart Telecom, Nepal Satellite Telecom and STM Telecom Sanchar—added 3.52 million new customers in the past one year, while a year ago they attracted a total of 4.2 million customers.
Telecom experts said that though the domestic market witnessed a fall in the growth rate of new users, there is still room for attracting customers with value added services and improved service quality.
“Mobile service has a huge potential because of the wireless broadband Internet capacity it has,” said Bhesh Raj Kanel, former chairman of the NTA. He added that even though the growth trend slowed, penetration could increase up to 150 percent.
As per the NTA, 5.8 million mobile users subscribed to the data service (GPRS, EDGE and 3G) for Internet access through their mobile handsets as of mid-February. The domestic market witnessed a significant growth in users of both voice and mobile data in the last three years, especially due to the competition between two telecom companies—NT and Ncell to capture the market share.
Of the total telecom service users, Ncell has a market share of 49 percent, NT 44 percent, UTL 3 percent, Smart Telecom 3 percent, while the remaining is shared by Nepal Satellite Telecom, STM Telecom and satellite phone service providers. With a view to increasing the market share, NT has implemented it biggest GSM mobile project of 10 million lines and 2 million IP-CDMA mobile lines.
Source: The Kathmandu Post
