Nigeria's active telecom subscriptions grew by 44.8 million over the past decade, reaching 195.1 million. The climb continued despite a sharp drop along the way, triggered by the NIN-SIM linkage policy that required every SIM card to be tied to a national identity number. Lines that failed the verification were knocked off the network, which took a visible bite out of subscriber numbers at the time. Even so, the market recovered and ended the decade far above where it started.