In the last quarter of 2007, there was a slight decrease in the number of main telephone accesses installed, which now set its share at 38.1 percent. According to Anacom, as has been happening since 2004, Portugal Telecom has again lost ground in the fixed telecommunications market. The incumbent operator ended 2007 with a market share of 68.9 percent in direct accesses and 71.9 percent in accesses installed at the request of customers.
In the regulator’s opinion, this decrease is related to «the decrease in the use of the traditional fixed telephone service; growth in bundled offers from cable television and Internet operators; the appearance, in early 2005, of an offer that uses technology GSM as an access technology and which has expanded considerably in the last year; the SLRO-based offers «.
The figures for the last quarter also indicate that, at the end of the quarter in question, there were 3.185 million direct access customers, which represents a drop of 1.4 percentage points compared to the previous three months and 1.9 percent in relation to the same period in 2006. The observed decrease is the result «of the offers of alternative providers supported by GSM technology and the bundled offers, integrating fixed telephony, cable television and / or Internet, which have been appearing in the market», he stresses Anacom.
With regard to total traffic on the fixed network, 715 million calls were registered during the quarter, which resulted in 2.123 billion minutes of conversation – representing an increase of 5.1 and 6.2 percent respectively compared to previous quarter but a decrease compared to the end of last year.
Negative variations were also felt in terms of voice traffic, with the tendency for the PT Group’s share of voice traffic shares to decline, whether in minutes – 67.5 percent in the quarter, minus 1.6 percentage points compared to the value recorded in the previous quarter – as in terms of calls – 67.2 percent, or 1.5 percentage points less than in the previous quarter.
Finally, at the end of December, there were 77 thousand active nomadic VoIP customers, representing an increase of 50.9 percent over the previous quarter and 2152.5 percent over the same period. This telecommunications segment already represents 2.2 percent of total fixed service traffic.
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