Nigeria's telecoms sector regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has announced that the industry added about 1.6 million new mobile internet subscribers within a month.

According to the latest figures released by the commission, the number of mobile internet subscribers in Nigeria has exceeded 87 million. The Commission also claims that there were 87,055,484 mobile internet users at the end of April, up from 85,467,970 users in March.

The increase of 1,587,514 internet users during the period was on both the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks.

This increase in mobile internet subscribers in Nigeria is in line with a prediction made by Dr Jonathan Doerr, managing director of Nigeria's ecommerce giant Jumia. While affirming that apps are the next big thing for ecommerce in Nigeria, he told ITWeb Africa that stakeholders should take steps to ensure that more Nigerians use the internet, especially via smartphones.

"I think mobile will take Nigeria and Nigerians to the next level. Government and all stakeholders – including telecos and OEMs and us, we should work to make it possible for every Nigerian to have a smartphone and every Nigerian has access to the internet because it makes them do so many things," he said.

The ability of Infinix Mobile, a France-based OEM company, to sell more than one million phones within a month after it began operations in Nigeria suggested that the mobile Doerr refers to may already be happening in Nigeria.

Benjamin Jiang, MD at Infinix Mobile, told ITWeb Africa that there is high demand for new smartphones among Nigerian users. This high demand forced the OEM to expand its supply network in order to make it easier for Nigerians to get its devices.

"On a particular Tuesday this month, we sold over 30,000 gadgets," Jiang said. "Nigeria is one of our biggest markets. We are expanding to Middle East, North Africa, East Africa, Asia, and France. Nigeria is one of our most important markets. It is the biggest market we are focusing on in Africa."

A breakdown of the number of internet subscribers on each operator's network according to the NCC latest report revealed Globacom had 19,690,526 subscribers surfing the net with its network in April, a significant rise from the 18,617,607 users in March. This shows that the network gained 1,072,919 additional internet users on its network during the period covered by the report.

This increase translates to 67.58% of the total number of new internet subscriber figure of 1,587,514 for the telecom networks for the month under review.

Another gainer is Airtel Nigeria which said it had 17.2 million internet users in April, as against 16,603,147 customers recorded in March.

However, MTN lost 384,487 internet subscribers in April, after it recorded 39,520,285 users, down from 39,904,772 in March 2015.