In Portugal, at the end of the third quarter of 2010, the number of households cabled with optical fibre (FTTx) for all operators totalled at 1.4 million.
The number of households with access supported over EuroDOCSIS 3.0 – the standard used by cable TV operators to provide high-speed services – totalled 3.4 million, which is 2.4 times more than the number of households cabled with optical fibre (FTTx).
In total, the number of households set up to access the high-speed Internet reached 4.85 million, compared to 4 million at the end of 2009.
High speed Internet accesses are concentrated in the Regions of Lisbon and the North.
At the end of September there were around 17 operators with installed high-speed accesses.
The number of residential customers using the service supported over high-speed accesses (FTTH and EuroDOCSIS 3.0 or equivalent) was reported at 225 thousand – at the end of 2009 there were 88 thousand. Meanwhile there were a reported 11,800 non-residential customers as at the end of September, compared to 3800 in December.
The penetration of residential customers in terms of family households is reported at 3.9 per 100 households, while the rate is highest in Lisbon (8.9 per 100 households), followed by the autonomous region of Madeira with 6.5 and the North region with 3.8 customers per 100 households.
The fixed next generation networks which provide high-speed accesses are currently supported over optical fibre (FTTx) and cable TV distribution networks which make use of the standard EuroDOCSIS 3.0.
