The figures obtained by Anacom for the first quarter of the year show that mobile broadband continues to be one of the growth drivers of this market, gaining 313 thousand new customers in this period and rising 13% compared to the previous quarter.
In total, and until the end of March, 2.69 million users were registered via the mobile network, although only 1.33 million users are active. Even so, the communications market regulator says that this figure grew 14.7% in the last quarter and 67.9% compared to the same period last year.
Access traffic on the mobile network also grew, increasing 7.8% over the previous quarter, with average monthly traffic per customer now standing at 1 GB.
Broadband with 98% of fixed accessesMaintaining a trend already noted, the growth of fixed Internet accesses is much lower, standing at 3.6% compared to the last three months of 2008, for 1.73 million customers. Broadband continues to dominate in a massive way, already representing 98% of accesses, which corresponds to about 1.7 million.
Dial-up access continues to lose customers, registering 38 thousand customers, 3 thousand less than at the end of 2008.
Anacom indicates that the commercial activity of Grupo PT, Zon and Vodafone sustain this growth.
The main technology for accessing the Internet from the fixed network remains ADSL, which represents 58.4%, however losing 3.6% over the last quarter. The cable network is used by 40% of customers with fixed broadband.
The PT group has the largest share of fixed broadband, with 42.5% of customers. According to Anacom data, in the first three months of the year, PT services won 64% of new fixed broadband customers.
Among the remaining operators, Zon grew by 0.3 percentage points to 31.6% and Vodafone also gained customers, but maintains a reduced market share of only 3.2%, while Cabovisão and Sonaecom are on the reverse route , as you can see in the table below.
At the end of March, the penetration rate for broadband Internet access was 16 per 100 inhabitants for fixed accesses and 25.4 per 100 inhabitants for mobile accesses.
