At the end of March, there were approximately 2.27 million fixed Internet access customers in Portugal and about 2.9 million users who actually used the Internet with mobile broadband, including 1.1 million through cards/modems.
The number of customers with the fixed Internet access service rose by 2.9% over the previous quarter and by 6.7% compared to the same quarter of 2011.
The majority of the 2.25 million customers of the internet access service at a fixed location use broadband, representing 98.9% of total customers, and growing by 3% over the quarter and by 6.8% year-on-year.
About 81% of fixed broadband Internet access service customers acquired the service as part of a bundle of services: about 10% were double-play customers (with TV or fixed telephone) and about 71% had a triple-play bundle (with TV + fixed telephone).
ADSL remains the main access technology used to support fixed broadband Internet (47.9% of total accesses). Cable modem accounts for 40% of fixed broadband accessed, and this quarter accounted for 23% of new accesses to the service.
Over the same period, there were about 275 thousand Internet accesses optical fibre (FTTH/B) Internet accesses reported - an increase of 16.1% over the previous quarter - representing 12% of total accesses. FTTH/B was the technology that saw greatest take-up.
Offers based on leased lines and FWA, representing only one percent of total accesses, declined by 9.3% over the previous quarter.
In terms of provider shares of fixed broadband accesses, Group PT's share was reported at 50.1%, an increase of 0.7 percentage points over the previous quarter and an increase of about 8.7 percentage points since the spin-off of PT Multimédia.
As regards mobile broadband, the number of users who actually accessed the Internet using mobile broadband in the first quarter totalled 2.9 million, a fall of 0.9% compared to the previous period. In annual terms, the number of users increased by 11.6% .
In terms of provider shares mobile broadband access customers using card/modem, TMN's share of customers was reported at 41.1%, followed by Optimus and Vodafone with 28.9 and 26%, respectively.
Broadband Internet access traffic grew by 3.3% in the first quarter. The evolution reported is principally driven by growth in fixed broadband traffic (3.3%) which represents approximately 95.7% of the total.
Meanwhile, Internet access traffic from mobile accesses (in GB) grew by 4.6%, with traffic generated by mobile accessed with card/modem connections representing about 94.7% of total Internet access traffic using mobile broadband.
Grupo PT and Grupo ZON are reported as having the highest shares of fixed broadband traffic (45.8% and 38.1%, respectively).
As at the end of March, the broadband Internet access penetration rate was reported at 21.4 per 100 inhabitants in the case of fixed access, and 27.3 per 100 inhabitants in the case of mobile access with actual use.
In the case of fixed access, this figure increased 0.3 points over the previous quarter, reported at 1.5 points above the figure reported for the same period of 2011.
Fixed Internet offers supported over FTTH/B had a penetration rate of 2.6 per 100 inhabitants.
Consult the statistical report:
- Internet Access Service - 1st quarter 2012 https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=1128692
