The volume of minutes generated in the fixed network increased by 1.5% in the 1st quarter of 2019 in relation to the same quarter of the previous year, reaching around 1.1 billion minutes. This is the first year-on-year increase since the 1st quarter of 2013, and is related to the exceptional measures taken due to COVID-19, which were enforced in March, and caused a significant change in the patterns of use of the fixed telephone service. During the week when state of emergency entered into force (the week of 16 to 22 March), voice traffic grew by 61% in relation to the week before the declaration of pandemic (2 to 8 March).
For the reason mentioned above, the average duration of the calls generated in the fixed network increased by around 17 seconds in the 1st quarter year-on-year. The average duration of fixed-fixed national calls increased by around 27 seconds.
Traffic in minutes has been falling since the beginning of 2013, due to the increased penetration of quadruple/quintuple play (4P/5P) packets which include mobile services with free calls to all networks, and the growing use of over-the-top (OTT) services. It should be recalled that in the 1st quarter of 2019, this type of traffic had fallen by 15.9% in relation to the 1st quarter of 2018.
Analysing access to the fixed telephone service, at the end of March there was a penetration rates of the main telephone accesses of 49.7 accesses per 100 inhabitants. The penetration rate for accesses installed at residential customer request stood at 90.4 per 100 private households.
In the quarter under review, the number of direct access fixed telephone service customers was around 4.1 million, 85 thousand more than in the 1st quarter of 2019, reflecting 2.1% growth.
In technological terms, the next generation networks continued to responsible for the increased number of main telephone accesses, which reached 5.1 million equivalent accesses, 64 thousand more accesses than in the same quarter of the previous year. The growth observed (1.3%) was primarily due to the increase in VoIP/VoB accesses (+334 thousand accesses), which includes accesses supported by fibre optic and cable TV networks. In the quarter under review, accesses supported by networks that are alternative to the traditional network (analogue and ISDN accesses) accounted for 77.5% of the main telephone accesses.
In terms of market shares, in the 1st quarter, the share of direct access customer of MEO reached 42.1%, followed by the NOS Group with 35.9%, Vodafone with 18.3% and the NOWO/Onitelecom Group with 3.4%. Vodafone was the only operator that increased its share, by one percentage point.
Consult the statistical report:
- Fixed telephone service - 1st quarter 2020 https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=1540246
