Sri Lankan Landline Subscriber Base Continues to Shrink

Landline subscribers continued to shrink in Sri Lanka as a price war amongst the mobile networks encouraged more people to become mobile-only households. The Lanka Business newspaper, citing a Central Bank report said that Sri Lanka Telecom saw its landline subscriber base shrink by 0.5 percent to 3.4 million customers.

At the same time, the mobile phone subscriber base rose by 25.9% to 13.9 million. Overall telecoms industry growth was 19.6 percent to 17.4 million phone connections in 2009.

"Expansion in coverage and introduction of improved and value added services for comparatively lower price by mobile service providers due to severe competition in the industry brought about discontinuation of existing fixed access telephone connections…," the Central Bank said.

According to figures from the Mobile World analysts, the mobile networks market shares at the end of last year are: Dialog Telekom (43.4%); Mobitel (23.2%); Tigo (15.8%); Bharti Airtel (12.3%) and Hutchison Telecom (5.3%);