Under new regulations for mobile phone users in Nigeria, indivdual customers can change their service providers and retain their numbers. This ensures the increase the competition between the top mobile service providers, namely, the MTN Group Ltd and Bharti Airtel Ltd.

The new regulations have been issued by the Nigerian Communications Commission to foster competition and provide more benefits to the consumers. Furthermore, rates for calls between different phone companies would be set 40% lower starting April 1.

According to NCC spokesman, Reuben Muoka, "Number portability will further foster competition on prices and quality of services. The reduction of termination rates followed a study on interconnect cost in the industry and is with this in mind that operators will drop charges to subscribers."

Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation comprising 160 million people with 155 million telephone subscribers according to the NCC. GSM subscrubers account fo 138 million customers, which is 89% of the total phone users in Nigeria. This is followed by Code Division Multiple Access or CDMA with 14 million subscribers and fixed lines with 2.4 million users.