Technology
Active Mobile Lines in Nigeria Jump 2% to 157.6 million in October 2024
By Adedapo Adesanya
The latest data from the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) shows that active mobile lines in Nigeria increased by 2 per cent month-on-month to 157.6 million in October 2024.
The growth in October ended the monthly drop in mobile line subscriptions that started in March 2024 due to the NIN-SIM linkage exercise imposed by the sector regulator.
As a result, all unlinked SIM cards were disabled, significantly reducing active mobile lines, and leading to telcos losing a considerable number of subscribers.
The data also showed that internet connections grew slightly by 1 per cent month-on-month to 134.2 million.
MTN Nigeria retained the largest market share, accounting for about 51 per cent of total subscriptions, relatively unchanged from September’s market share position.
Airtel followed closely with a market share of 35 per cent while Globacom came third with a subscriber market share of 12 per cent, with 9Mobile (formerly Etisalat) accounting for a low market share of 2 per cent.
In terms of customer additions, MTN Nigeria recorded the most significant increase as it gained about 2.3 million or 2.9 per cent customers month-on-month bringing its total customer base of 80.4 million.
Airtel came second with a subscriber addition of about 697,000 users in October, taking its customer base to 54.4 million.
9Mobile, once a darling network in Nigeria, suffered the largest attrition, with subscriber losses of 6.7 per cent or 245,000 month-on-month users to 3.4 million.
Globacom’s customer base declined by 45,000 lines to 19.1 million during the period under review.
The telecommunication sector has remained resilient despite the challenging business environment which has seen returns eroded by rising operational expenses as well as the volatile exchange rate.
In the latest third quarter of 2024 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the telecommunication sector contributed in real terms to the country by 13.94 per cent.
However, contributions of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector to real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Q3 2024 declined by 3.43 per cent.
It increased from 19.78 per cent in Q2 2024 to 16.35 per cent in the third quarter of the year.
Technology
re:Invent 2025: AWS Excites Tech Enthusiasts With Graviton5 Unveiling
By Aduragbemi Omiyale
One of the high points of the 2025 re:Invent was the unveiling of Graviton5, the fifth generation of custom Arm-based server processors from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many tech enthusiasts believe that the company pushed the limits with Graviton5, its most powerful and efficient CPU, frontier agents that can work autonomously for days, an expansion of the Amazon Nova model family, Trainium3 UltraServers, and AWS AI Factories suitable for implementing AI infrastructure in customers’ existing data centres.
Graviton5—the company’s most powerful and efficient CPU
As cloud workloads grow in complexity, organizations face a persistent challenge to deliver faster performance at lower costs and meet sustainability commitments without trade-offs.
AWS’ new Graviton5-based Amazon EC2 M9g delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation, with 192 cores per chip and 5x larger cache.
For the third year in a row, more than half of new CPU capacity added to AWS is powered by Graviton, with 98 per cent of the top 1,000 EC2 customers—including Adobe, Airbnb, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, SAP, and Siemens—already benefiting from Graviton’s price performance advantages.
Expansion of Nova family of models and pioneers “open training” with Nova Forge
Amazon is expanding its Nova portfolio with four new models that deliver industry-leading price-performance across reasoning, multimodal processing, conversational AI, code generation, and agentic tasks. Nova Forge pioneers “open training,” giving organizations access to pre-trained model checkpoints and the ability to blend proprietary data with Amazon Nova-curated datasets.
Nova Act achieves breakthrough 90% reliability for browser-based UI automation workflows built by early customers. Companies like Reddit are using Nova Forge to replace multiple specialized models with a single solution, while Hertz accelerated development velocity by 5x with Nova Act.
Addition of 3 frontier agents, a new class of AI agents that work as an extension of your software development team
Frontier agents represent a step-change in what agents can do. They’re autonomous, scalable, and can work for hours or days without intervention. AWS announced three frontier agents—Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. Kiro autonomous agent acts as a virtual developer for your team, AWS Security Agent is your own security consultant, and AWS DevOps Agent is your on-call operational team.
Companies, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia, SmugMug, and Wester Governors University have used one or more of these agents to transform the software development lifecycle.
Unveiling Trainium3 UltraServers
As AI models grow in size and complexity, training cutting-edge models requires infrastructure investments that only a handful of organizations can afford.
Amazon EC2 Trn3 UltraServers, powered by AWS’s first 3nm AI chip, pack up to 144 Trainium3 chips into a single integrated system, delivering up to 4.4x more compute performance and 4x greater energy efficiency than Trainium2 UltraServers.
Customers achieve 3x higher throughput per chip while delivering 4x faster response times, reducing training times from months to weeks. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50 per cent with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.
Technology
NITDA Alerts Nigerians to ChatGPT Vulnerabilities
By Adedapo Adesanya
The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has issued an advisory on new vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that could expose users to data-leakage attacks.
According to the advisory, researchers discovered seven vulnerabilities affecting GPT-4o and GPT-5 models that allow attackers to manipulate ChatGPT through indirect prompt injection.
The agency explained that hidden instructions placed inside webpages, comments, or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) can trigger unintended commands during regular browsing, summarisation, or search actions.
“By embedding hidden instructions in webpages, comments, or crafted URLs, attackers can cause ChatGPT to execute unintended commands simply through normal browsing, summarization, or search actions,” they stated.
The warning followed rising concerns about AI-powered tools interacting with unsafe web content and the growing dependence on ChatGPT for business, research, and public-sector tasks.
NITDA added that some flaws allow the bypassing of safety controls by masking malicious content behind trusted domains.
Other weaknesses take advantage of markdown rendering bugs, enabling hidden instructions to pass undetected.
It explained that in severe cases, attackers can poison ChatGPT’s memory, forcing the system to retain malicious instructions that influence future conversations
They stated that while OpenAI has fixed parts of the issue, Large-Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to reliably separate genuine user intent from malicious data.
The Agency warned that these vulnerabilities could lead to a range of cybersecurity threats, including unauthorised actions carried out by the model; unintended exposure of user information; manipulated or misleading outputs; and long-term behavioural changes caused by memory poisoning, among others.
It advised Nigerians, businesses, and government institutions to adopt several precautionary steps to stay safe. These include limiting or disabling the browsing and summarisation of untrusted websites within enterprise environments and enabling features like browsing or memory only when necessary.
It also recommended regular updates to deployed GPT-4o and GPT-5 models to ensure known vulnerabilities are patched.
Technology
OPay, Coinbase, Others Crash as Cloudflare Suffers Another Glitch
By Adedapo Adesanya
Cloudflare Incorporated, a business providing cloud-based services to various enterprises, said in a note on Friday it is investigating issues with its Dashboard and related Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Numerous companies and services, including payments platform like OPay as well as Canva, Coinbase Global Incorporated, Investing.com , Shopify Incorporated, and Zoom Video Communications Incorporated, all appeared to crash, with some seeing “500 internal server error” and “Please check your internet connection and try again”.
The global outage has left many users unable to access these key services as this disruption has not only affected individuals but also businesses relying on these platforms for their operations.
Customers using the Dashboard or Cloudflare APIs are impacted as requests might fail and errors may be displayed, the company said on its status page.
In its latest update, Cloudflare added that “a fix has been implemented,” with the firm monitoring the results.
Users from all over the world have taken to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to voice their frustrations over the issue.
This is Cloudflare’s second major disruption in nearly a month, following another incident in November that affected services like Spotify and ChatGPT.
At the last outage, Cloudflare’s services were largely restored within three hours, and fully restored after approximately five hours.
-
Feature/OPED6 years agoDavos was Different this year
-
Travel/Tourism9 years ago
Lagos Seals Western Lodge Hotel In Ikorodu
-
Showbiz3 years agoEstranged Lover Releases Videos of Empress Njamah Bathing
-
Banking7 years agoSort Codes of GTBank Branches in Nigeria
-
Economy3 years agoSubsidy Removal: CNG at N130 Per Litre Cheaper Than Petrol—IPMAN
-
Banking3 years agoFirst Bank Announces Planned Downtime
-
Banking3 years agoSort Codes of UBA Branches in Nigeria
-
Sports3 years agoHighest Paid Nigerian Footballer – How Much Do Nigerian Footballers Earn













Pingback: Active Mobile Lines in Nigeria Jump 2% to 157.6 million in October 2024 – Herald Today