ACM Telecom Monitor for Q3 2023: Mobile-data consumption continues to grow, but number of voice minutes decreases
The latest telecom monitor by the Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) reveals that, in the third quarter of 2023, mobile-data consumption went up again (by 8.6%). The growth in data peaked in the third quarter of 2023, but the number of voice minutes continues to trend downwards.
Compared with the second quarter, the mobile-data consumption increased by 44 million gigabyte to a total of 558 million gigabyte in the third quarter. That is the highest quarterly consumption of mobile data since ACM started recording consumption. The number of data-only sim cards, which are cards used by consumers for mobile data, also went up by 14,000 to a total of 979,000. Like in the second quarter of 2023, the number of machine-to-machine (M2M) sim cards also increased substantially in the third quarter of 2023, by approximately 800,000. The total number of machine-to-machine sim cards with which smart devices process data was 17.3 million.
The number of mobile voice minutes actually went down considerably in the third quarter of 2023, by more than 7%. Since the third quarter of 2022, there had been a decrease in the number of fixed voice minutes, but this seems to have stabilized now with 1.21 billion voice minutes in the third quarter of 2023, compared with 1.22 billion voice minutes in the second quarter of 2023. The majority of voice minutes concerned calls from landlines to mobile. The number of fixed telephony connections also continues to show a downward trend. In the third quarter of 2023, the number of fixed telephony connections went down again (by 70,000).
The number of households with broadband plans increased slightly by 0.3% to 7.84 million. The number of households with fiber-optic plans increased by 91,000 to 2.57 million. This increase came, in part, at the expense of the number of plans over cable networks and copper networks, which decreased by 27,000 and 39,000 respectively. In addition, the data shows that the roll-out of fiber-optic is progressing steadily. In the third quarter of 2023, 330,000 new fiber-optic connections were rolled out, bringing the total to 6.7 million.
In addition, the number of television plans decreased in the third quarter of 2023 by over one percent. The share of television over fiber-optic in the total number of plans did increase slightly by 2.3%.