In 2020, there was a 9% increase in the volume of minutes originated in the fixed network in relation to 2019 (for which there was a 15% reduction in relation to 2018). This exceptional increase was due to the significant changes in the patterns of use of the services arising from COVID-19. It is estimated that the pandemic had a positive effect of 22.2% on the average traffic per access in 2020. If the pandemic had not occurred, it is estimated that fixed voice traffic by access, instead of having grown by 7%, would have fallen by 12.2% in 2020.
By type of call, the growth that occurred was primarily the result of the increased fixed-fixed traffic (+7.3%), and to a lesser extent, fixed-mobile traffic (+22.5%), which has a lower weight. It should also be noted that the reduction of national traffic originated in public payphones (-40.4%) was the highest since 2015, exacerbating the decline that has been recorded over the past few years (on average, by -19.7%/year). Nomadic VoIP traffic (+27.1%) recorded its highest increase since 2017.
International traffic fell by 9.4% and, in particular, international traffic originated in public payphones declined by 66.3%, probably influenced by the effects of the pandemic.
For the same reason, the average duration of the calls generated in the fixed network increased by around 33 seconds in relation to the previous year (+16.6%).
Analysing access to the fixed telephone service, in 2020, there was a penetration rate of the main telephone accesses of 50.6 accesses per 100 inhabitants, having grown by 0.9 percentage points year-on-year. The penetration rate of accesses installed at residential customer request stood at 94.3 per 100 private households, 4.3 percentage points more than in the previous year. The observed growth was not only due to the increased number of accesses, but also due to the statistical effect of the lower number of households (-1.9%).
In the year under review, the number of direct access fixed telephone service customers was around 4.2 million, 95 thousand more (+2.3%) than in the previous year. This growth is linked to the growing penetration of bundled offers which include fixed telephone.
In technological terms, the next generation networks continued to responsible for the increased number of main telephone accesses, which reached 5.2 million equivalent accesses, 94 thousand more accesses than in the same quarter of the previous year. This growth (+1.8%) was primarily due to the increase in VoIP/VoB accesses (+304 thousand accesses), which include accesses supported by fibre optic and cable TV networks.
In 2020, accesses supported by next generation networks (optical fibre to the home (FTTH), cable TV networks and mobile networks at a fixed location), accounted for 80.8% of telephone accesses, with their weight having increased by 4.2 percentage points in relation to the previous year.
In terms of market shares, at the end of 2020, the share of direct access customer of MEO reached 42.0%, followed by the NOS Group with 35.3%, Vodafone with 19.1% and the NOWO/Onitelecom Group with 3.2%. The shares of direct access customers of MEO, NOS and NOWO/Onitelecom declined by 0.1, 0.7 and 0.4 percentage points, respectively, with Vodafone's share having increased by 1.0 percentage points.
Consult the statistical report:
- Fixed telephone service - 2020 https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=1604093
