One friend of mine sent a couple of scanned copies of local newspapers. I want to share these weird accidents involving mobile phones. Comments will be highly appreciated.

A bit of history of mobile phone in Nepal: First GSM Mobile service was launched in Nepal in 1999. Since then there have been many mobile subscribers to the service. Another service provider, Mero Mobile, started its service in 2005. However, they haven’t been able to provide the service as per demand.

Mobile phones in Nepal

In 2016, the number of mobile subscriptions surprised the population of Nepal. That was because of a single person subscribing to more than one service. That has caused the mobile service penetration rate to 105.15 percent of the population. That was according to the Management Information System (MIS) Report of Nepal Telecommuni-cations Authority (NTA) in June of 2016.

The data of February 2016 show that the number of mobile subscriptions in Nepal stands at 27.85 million. That is against the total population of 26.49 million. Among the telecommunications services available in Nepal, the landline phone has the least penetration at 3.2 percent.

The growth of mobile phone in Nepal has caused the rise in the sales of handheld devices. The import of mobile phone grew by 33 percent year-on-year. Total number of set imported were 4.16 million costing Rs. 14.63 billion as of mid-May. The data was provided by the Department of Customs. The rise in the mobile penetration has also helped in the increase in other services like internet. Now, about 45 percent of the population has access to internet. That was mid-October 2015 data by NTA.

There are two major telecom giants in Nepal. Nepal Telecom and Ncell—hold almost all – 97 percent share in the domestic data market of Internet. That is, almost all those who use internet use it in their mobile device. Nepal Telecom has a market share of 56.99 percent. Ncell has 40.62 percent share of internet data. When looked in the past, there were less than 50 internet users in 1995. Now, the number has grown to 12.51 million as of mid-February 2016. This rise is attributed to the smartphone revolution of late 2000s.

According to the global forecasts, more than half of the adults own smartphones and the figure is predicted to reach 80 percent by 2020.