At the end of the first quarter of 2010 there were 15.8 million active mobile stations associated with post-paid, pre-paid and hybrid tariff plans. Of these around 82.7% saw actual use in the last month of the quarter.
Post-paid plans represented 17% of the total, pre-paid plans around 71.6% and combined/hybrid plans around 11.4%.
In the period being reported, the mobile service's penetration rate stood at 148.9 per 100 inhabitants (although interpretation of the figure given for the number of subscribers should take account of the fact that there are users who have more than one card for accessing the service; there are SIM cards used exclusively for Internet access and data services, as well as active cards used in machines, equipment and vehicles and cards in corporate use).
If cards/modems used exclusively for broadband Internet access are excluded from the total of mobile stations, the number of active devices in actual use is reported at 11.9 million, of which CTT has 0.6%, Sonaecom has 15.2%; TMN has 43,9%; Vodafone, 40.1%; and ZON 0.3%.
In the first quarter of the year, the number of users equipped to use broadband services surpassed 8.4 million.
The number of active users actually using services which are characteristic of 3rd generation (video-telephony, broadband data transmission, mobile TV) exceeded 3.1 million, 22.6% more than in the previous quarter.
Users equipped to use broadband services (UMTS/HSPA) represented 53.2% of the total of active mobile stations, while active use constitutes 24.2% of the total of mobile stations in actual use.
Of the users of broadband service who registered traffic in the last month of the period being reported, around 37.3% are users of the mobile broadband Internet access service with cards/modem.
Between January and March, over two billion calls were made, which represents a fall of 4.6% over the previous quarter and an increase of 5% year-on-year. Meanwhile, the number of calls received totalled 1.9 billion which represents a fall of 8% over the previous quarter but an increase of 0.8% year-on-year.
Compared to the first quarter of 2009, fixed mobile traffic reported a significant decline (-14.1%), reinforcing the trend in place for some years.
An average of 56 calls per month were made from active mobile stations in use during the quarter, excluding mobile broadband Internet access cards. Around 38 of calls made were to the same provider as that of the caller and 11 to other providers of the same service.
The number of conversation minutes originating on mobile networks totalled 4.6 billion minutes, a decrease of 1.5% over the previous quarter. Compared to the same period of the previous year, the number of minutes rose by 11.5%, above the growth rate in the number of active mobile stations.
The average duration of calls originated on the mobile network during this quarter maintains its upward trend, with an average of 137 second reported per call, around four seconds more than was reported in the previous quarter and eight seconds more than for the same period of 2009.
The number of conversation minutes originating on mobile networks totalled 4.6 billion minutes, a decrease of 2.5% over the previous quarter. Compared to the same period of the previous year, the number of incoming minutes rose by 10.2%, driven by on-net traffic. It is noted that fixed-mobile traffic fell by 14.5% compared to the first quarter of 2009, continuing the trend of recent years.
During the period being reported, 6.3 billion text messages were reported. This figure is 0.9% less than the figure reported for the previous quarter and 4% more than the figure reported in the same quarter of 2009. Of this total, the number of premium value messages represented 0.2%, representing a total of 15 million messages.
During the quarter, each subscriber sent an average of 288 text messages, and six MMS messages. Over 25.3 million MMS messages were sent during the quarter, 4.4% more than in the previous quarter and 14.5% more than in the first quarter of 2009.
Meanwhile, it is reported that 1.3 million video-calls were made, 5.7% more than in the previous quarter. The conversation time associated with these calls also rose, by around 3.8% over the previous quarter.
As far as mobile TV is concerned, the number of users is reported at just over 63.7 thousand, with around 1.2 million sessions, corresponding to six sessions per user.
