During the period between April and June, telecoms registered a decrease in voice calls, the Uganda Communications Commission Market Performance Report, indicates.
The report indicates that voice calls between April and June dropped to 13.1 billion minutes of domestic talk time from 13.9 billion in the first quarter of 2020, covering the period between January and March.
The performance, which represents a 5 per cent quarter-on-quarter drop, included both on-net calls between subscribers on the same network as well as off-net traffic-calls between subscribers on different mobile networks.
The drop, the report said, may have been attributed to suppressed commercial activity during the early days of the lockdown, which had been characterised by a complete lockdown from April to June. UCC also said the drop could have been a result of the 2.9 million Simcards that were wiped off the telecommunications network in the period between April and June due in part, to “a clean-up of one of the subscribers register”.
The report indicates that during the period on-net traffic dropped to 13 billion minutes of domestic talk time down from 13.6 billion in the January-March 2020 quarter while off-net talk time minutes averaged at 45.4 million compared to 49 million in the previous quarter.
According to UCC, on-net domestic traffic dropped by 4 per cent while off-net domestic traffic dropped by 28 per cent in the three months between April and June 2020, which could be a representative of the different affordability sensitivities across the two traffic categories.
UCC also noted that drop could have been a result of online messaging solutions.
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