2013 Telecom Monitor Q3 - increase of very fast broadband connections

Mobile services

Within the timespan of a single year, the total number of mobile connections dropped by almost 900,000 connections to 21.0 million connections. In the third quarter of 2013, 19.1 million of these connections concern mobile phones. In addition, almost 10.4 million of these connections concern smartphones or tablets. The number of connections that can only be used for mobile data is decreasing because operators are focusing more and more on subscriptions that can be used for both data and voice.

With 5.6 billion voice minutes in Q3, the number of used voice minutes slightly increased by 4 percent compared with the same period in the previous year. The number of text messages has dropped by 28 percent compared with the previous year to just over 1.3 billion messages per quarter, while data traffic increased by 47 percent to 8.7 petabyte per quarter.

Fixed telephony

In Q3 2013, too, consumers continued to switch to digital telephony.  Digital telephony is growing at the expense of PSTN connections, as a result of which that 76 percent of all connections at the end of Q3 were digital. In the dual call service market, a significant drop can be observed in the number of ISDN1 and ISDN2 connections. Compared with the same period in 2012, there are 126,000 fewer connections of these types. With 24,000 new connections added within the timespan of a single year, the number of digital connections in this market is growing less rapidly than the market for single call services. In the large-business segment, a slight drop in the number of ISDN connections can be observed, whereas an increase can be seen in the digital varieties.

Broadband

In late-September 2013, the total number of broadband subscriptions over landlines was 6.7 million. In Q3, the number of connections grew by 15,000. The number of DSL connections decreased by 82,000, which is considerably stronger than in the previous quarter, whereas both the number of fiber optic connections and cable connections increased more considerably (+43,000 and +54,000). The rise in connections was particularly observed in the segment with higher download speeds (100 Mbps or higher). At the end of Q3, approximately 7 percent of all subscriptions had an advertised download speed of 100 Mbps or higher.

Television

Eighty-five percent of all households (a total of 7.4 million television subscriptions) have digital television, which is an increase of 4 percentage points compared with the same period in the previous year. The remaining 15 percent has analog television. Fifty-eight percent of digital connections are cable-based, while the other digital connections are based on other infrastructures.

While the total number of subscriptions in the last quarter stayed the same, the number of subscriptions over the cable decreased by 35,000. Despite the shifting market shares of the different infrastructures, the market shares of the market participants have more or less remained unchanged.