Glo Mobile Ghana says the recent increase in its data subscribers by over 1.4 million in just one month is because of network upgrade that resulted in a 42mb/sec download speeds on its network nationwide.

"We have upgraded our network to 42mb/s download speed nationwide," the company said in response to a questionnaire from Adom News on factors leading to the unprecedented increase in its data subs.

Indeed, great customer experience, when it comes to data, is largely about download and upload speeds, and Glo Ghana Head of Business, Akeem Kazeem said Glo offers the best of that nationwide.

The most recent mobile data statistics published by the National Communications Authority (NCA) indicated Glo made the biggest gains in the mobile data market with a whopping 1.4 million plus additional data customers in just one month.

"Glo finished January 2015 as the highest subscriber gainer with 2,091,600 subscribers as compared to the December 2014 figure of 668,424. Their market share at the end of the month under review was 2.48%," the NCA report said.

Meanwhile, Glo has not been very impressive on the voice market. Its voice subscriber base saw a marginal decline from 1,450,382 to 1,438,929 over the same period, indicating a decrease of 0.78%. This pushed their market share to 5.17%.

Clearly, Glo has more data customers than voice customers; at least 652,671 more. However, Kazeem said  Glo's voice service is also superior, but customers are getting more sophisticated and therefore opting more for its data services than voice.

Within last year, Glo saw marginal increases to its data subs month after month like every other telco did, but in the last two months before the close of the year it actually recorded some decline in data subs.

Between October and November, 2014, it's data subs dropped from 680,000 plus to a little over 672,000; then it dropped further to 668,000 plus in December 2014.

So the huge increase between December and January, just after two consecutive months of decline, has stunned industry watchers.

Very often, smaller players have not been able to maintain their gains over the long term, but  Kazeem is optimistic Glo is poised to maintain its winning ways on the data market and continue to add more voice and data customers going forward.

"We are positioned to maintain more than these customers over the long-term as we are continuing the upgrade and expansion of all our facilities nationwide. We have still not reached our optimum capacity, and as the latest entrant in the market we have huge potential in terms of Network Capacity and Quality," he said.

Kazeem noted that data subscribers are fast growing across networks largely because customers are getting more sophisticated and are adopting smart devices, adding that currently Glo, for instance, has a data to voice customer ratio of 1:5 and they expect that to grow significantly over the year, on the back of its various value offerings.

"We believe we offer the best voice and data services in the market at reasonable and competitive prices," he said, adding "Glo Kappah, for instance, is one of the best products available in this market and it is gaining huge popularity and doing good."

Other telcos

But it would appear other regular data subs gainers like MTN lost quite significant numbers of subs as Glo gained. MTN lost at least 258,596 data subs over the periods under review while Expresso also lost more than 32,000 of its 37,000 data customers within the period.

Tigo also gained quite significantly on the data front on the back of its "drop the yam" promo. The telco gained more that 165,000 new data subs over the one month period.

Vodafone also gained over 84,000 additional data subs on the back of its Red packages, while Airtel also gained over 25,000 new data customers over the period.

Meanwhile, total data subs across networks stood at over 17.2 million representing about 56% of the total mobile cellular subscribers in the country.