Sultanate’s total number of fixed telephone lines including post- and pre-paid, public, WLL, and ISDN channels registered a growth of 13.7 per cent during the first 10 months of 2015.
Fixed telephone subscriber base stood at 426,558 by the end of October, as against 420,491 registered by the end of last December according to the figures issued by the National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI).
Meanwhile, there has been a 6.6 per cent rise in the number of mobile subscribers (post- and pre-paid) during the period, with figures rising to more than 6,604,440 as against 6,561,696 by end of September 2015.
Among fixed lines, fixed prepaid (card fixed) telephones witnessed the highest growth at almost 60 per cent.
Prepaid mobile connections grew by 6.4 per cent to 6,025,475 NCSI statistics said.
Interestingly, during the period, the number of Internet subscribers surged by 24.4 per cent to 224,111 primarily due to a 25 per cent growth in fixed broadband subscribers whose numbers reached 221,283 by the end of October 2015.
The NCSI figures also show that a growth of 7.6 per cent in the number of Active Mobile Broadband Subscribers pushed such subscriptions to over 3,112,104.