Anacom’s figures for the first quarter of this year show that the number of broadband users in Portugal was at the end of March 996 thousand, adding the various forms of access provided by operators.
The figures released by the regulator also reveal that in this period the number of broadband users through ADSL exceeded the number of cable accesses for the first time, becoming the main broadband technology used in the country.
Both technologies maintain an identical number of users and maintained growth rates compared to previous periods of analysis. ADSL (with a 52 percent share) had 499 thousand users at the end of the quarter, while cable accumulated 464 thousand users.
However, the number of ADSL accesses increased 18.7 percent in the first three months of the year, with the addition of 79 thousand new customers, while cable registered a more moderate growth (6.6 percent) with the addition of 29 thousand new users.
The combination of the various technologies increases broadband penetration in Portugal to 9.2 percent, an increase of 12.5 percent compared to the previous quarter, and of 68 percent compared to the same period last year.
In the narrow band the numbers are much more expressive, although they must be analyzed taking into account that the same user can be a customer of several ISPs, since the service is free. In the first three months of the year, data from the regulator say that the number of dial-up users increased 9.2 percent, compared to the previous quarter, to settle at 4.210 million.
At the end of March, there were 40 entities in Portugal authorized to provide Internet access services, of which 30 were active.
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