The Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) announced in its latest “Active mobile subscribers as of August 2012” report that the country’s active mobile subscribers had gone over 5 million.
The report shows that the mobile cellular penetration rate is at 47.5 percent as of August 2012, from 45.6 percent at the end of July 2012.
The increase in subscriber is possibly a result of improved customer care by the mobile service providers and better connectivity.
MTN Rwanda Ltd is still the largest mobile service provider in the country with over 3.1 million subscribers, a reasonable jump from close to 3 million in July 2012. Tigo Rwanda comes second with about 1.7 million and Airtel Rwanda third with just about 160,000 subscribers.
On releasing the statistics, RURA praised the country’s three mobile services providers for keeping in touch with the needs of their customers.
The improved subscriber numbers are an encouraging trend as Rwanda has been improving the overall speed of the mobile networks and this, RURA says, has had a significant impact on growing subscriber numbers as well as providing all citizens the opportunity to have access to mobile phones and the mobile related services.
MTN and Tigo were recently criticised for outages on their networks in the country and RURA has called on the two largest mobile operators in the country, MTN and Tigo, to improve their networks after these reported outages as it was being alleged that they are becoming more frequent.
