The total number of minutes on fixed local telephone lines dropped by almost a quarter last year from 2007, figures issued this morning by the NSO show. The totals were 194,600,137 minutes in 2007 and 147,154,086 last year.
The number of minutes on international fixed lines was down by 2.3 percent with a drop from 1,696,852 in 2007 to 1,658,520 last year. The number of calls made to international fixed lines was down by 20%.
The loss by fixed lines were gain by mobile telephony which saw an 8.5% rise in minutes consumed to local mobile networks to 56,859,526 and a 12.2 percent increase in minutes to local fixed networks for a total of 6,216,565 minutes.
The number of SMSs rose by 1.2 percent to a staggering 121.6 million but the number of MMSs dropped by 18.1 percent to 86,127.