The volume of traffic in minutes starting in the fixed telephone network decreased by 15% compared to 2018, the equivalent of 722 million minutes, the largest fall recorded since 2015. The decline in traffic is associated with the increased use of mobile communications and internet communications via over-the-top (OTT) services.
The data on fixed telephone traffic show that an average of 67 minutes of access were consumed per month, 48 minutes of which were fixed-to-fixed calls, 8 minutes for fixed-to-mobile calls and 4 minutes for international calls.
The fixed telephone service reached 5.1 million accesses at the end of 2019, 1.1% more than the previous year (corresponding to 55,000 new accesses). This increase is due mainly to access supported on optical fibre and cable TV networks (+327,000 accesses), which more than made up for the decrease in analogue accesses (-210,000 accesses), ISDN accesses (-45,000 accesses) and fixed access supported on mobile networks (-17,000 accesses). At the end of 2019, the access supported on networks other than the traditional network (analogue and ISDN accesses) accounted for 76.4% of the main telephone accesses.
In terms of customer numbers, the number of fixed telephone service customers with direct access was around 4.1 million subscribers at the end of 2019, 2.1% more than the previous year. This growth is associated with the increasing penetration of package deals that include fixed telephony.
At the end of the year under analysis, and in terms of the three largest operators, MEO reached a share of 42.1% of direct access customers, the NOS Group had 36% and Vodafone, 18.1%. Compared to the end of 2018, the MEO and NOS direct access customer share fell by 0.2 and 0.7 percentage points, respectively, while the Vodafone share increased by 1.1 percentage points.
In terms of traffic, MEO had a share of 40.4%, followed by the NOS Group with 33.8%, both recording an increase of 0.2 percentage points; Vodafone had 16.7%, 1.5 percentage points more than the previous year.
Consult the statistical report:
- Fixed telephone service - 2019 https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=1519371
