Kathmandu, June 6

More than 3.6 million people subscribed to voice telephony service, popularly known as mobile phone service of different telecom companies in the last one year, as per the latest Management Information System (MIS) report.

As per report published by Nepal Telecommunications Authority, subscription of voice telephony service (fixed, mobile and others) has reached 38.16 million in the country till mid-March, 2018. Until mid-March last year, 34.53 million people had subscribed to voice telephony service.

Following this, the telephone penetration in Nepal has reached 130.29 per cent of the population.

Telephone penetration measures the percentage of a country’s population with access to telephony services as determined by the subscriber base. It is calculated based on national census of 2011, which put Nepal’s total population at 26.49 million.

However, it is to be noted that though people’s access to mobile phone service in the country is increasing, tele-density data in the report is not reliable as many customers are using more than one SIM card of different telecom companies. Some customers even have more than one SIM card of a single service provider.

The MIS report shows a majority of customers in the last one year subscribed to the voice telephony service of Nepal Telecom (NT). While the total number of subscribers of NT’s voice telephony service was almost 17 million until mid-March last year, its subscriber base had crossed 19 million till mid-March this year.

Similarly, the number of voice telephony subscribers of Ncell has increased to almost 16.5 million till mid-March this year from 15 million recorded till mid-March of 2017.

Of the total subscribers of voice telephony service in the country, 127.34 per cent of the subscribers are using mobile phone service. Similarly, 2.94 per cent have subscribed to fixed telephone service and 0.01 per cent have subscribed to other telephony services like Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite, states the MIS report.