Telephone Boom in Mauritius, Coverage at 99%
APA - Port Louis (Mauritius) Around 99 percent of the Mauritian population is presently covered by mobile cellular telephony according to the latest Economic Indicators which the Central Statistics Office (CSO) released on Saturday in the Mauritius capital Port Louis.
CSO writes in the report that comparatively, the number of mobile cellular subscribers shot up by 20.2% to attain 928,600 in 2007 compared to 772,400 in 2006 for a population of 1.2 million.
Mobidensity or the number of mobile phones per 100 inhabitants increased by 19% reaching 73.4 in 2007, the report said.
Furthermore, it indicates that there was also some 361,340 fixed telephone lines in 2007 and that with the introduction of mobile phones, the number of fixed telephone lines has registered low growth since 2003.
The report however notes that in comparison with a number of other African countries on the continent the number of internet subscribers at the end of 2007 reached 166,000, which worked out to be only 13.1 subscribers per 100 inhabitants.
Finally, the CSO report recommends that the state should liberalise the granting of licences to internet operators, and observed that the cost of connections per minute to internet is also too high for poor families.
Posted to the site on 24th August 2008
