ACM Telecom Monitor: more plans over fiber-optic than over copper
In the third quarter of 2022, the number of Dutch households with fiber-optic connections went up by 290,000 to over 5.3 million. A total of 2.39 million plans use such fiber-optic connections. That is 11,000 more than in the previous quarter, which means that, for the first time ever, there were more plans over fiber-optic than over copper. A total of 2.25 million plans use copper lines, which is a decrease of 6,000. These are some of the conclusions in the most recent Telecom Monitor published by the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM).
The number of plans over cable remains the highest with 3.83 million plans, which saw a decrease of 20,000. In the third quarter, the total number of households with cable connections remained more or less the same at almost 8 million households.
The interactive fiber-optic map shows that The Hague is the municipality with the most addresses with fiber-optic connections: almost 151,000. Of those addresses, less than 20 percent have plans over fiber-optic. Waalre, Harderwijk and Ameland are the municipalities with the highest percentages of active fiber-optic connections: between 70 and 80 percent.
Telecom operator KPN has thus far realized the majority of the roll-out of fiber-optic in the Netherlands, between 60 and 65 percent. Delta Fiber’s market share is between 15 and 20 percent, while that of Opendutchfiber is between 5 and 10 percent.
Mobile
A total of 21.6 million sim cards are currently active for mobile plans and prepaid, which is 1.2 percent more than in the second quarter. Of those active sim cards, 910,000 are used for data-only plans, which is an increase of 15,000. In the third quarter, 613 million text messages were sent, which is an increase of 6.3 percent. The number of mobile voice minutes dropped almost 10 percent to 9.8 billion minutes.
Mobile-data consumption went up by 6 percent to 428 million gigabytes. That figure includes data traffic using sim cards for smart devices and cars (also called machine-to-machine or M2M), of which there are 14 million, which is half a million more than in the previous quarter.
The number of landline connections continues to drop steadily. In the third quarter, it dropped by 5.4 percent to 4.7 million.