Friday 19 / April / 2024
Muscat: In the first 11 months of the current year the Sultanate recorded a significant 20.2 per cent increase in the number of active mobile broadband subscribers.
The number exceeded 3.9 million by the end of November 2016, according to a statistical update from the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI). Meanwhile, the number of fixed broadband subscribers increased 18.6 per cent to 276,643 during the same period.
However, the number of dial-up internet subscribers fell by almost 8 per cent to 2,551 during the period.
The total fixed telephone lines went up from 434,932 lines as of December 2015 to 466,354 lines as of November this year, marking an increase of 7.2 per cent. The number of VoIP lines stood at 124,057 in November, in contrast to just 540 lines in September, and no VoIP lines at all in 2015.
At the same time, fixed postpaid connections fell 14 per cent to 279,219 along with a 69.7 per cent drop in the number of fixed prepaid lines, which came down to 16,954 during the period.
The public pay telephones remained at 6,801, with no growth over the period whereas ISDN channels decreased by 16.6% to 37,764 while WLL connections fell 12% to 1,559. Postpaid mobile connections increased 4.6 per cent to 612,226, while prepaid connections rose 2.7 per cent to over 6.22 million. Prepaid mobile operators marginally increased by 0.5 per cent to more than 5.06 million, while resellers grew by 13.6 per cent to over 1.16 million by the end of November, the NCSI report said.
