At the end of the 2nd Quarter of 2007 there were around 3.3 million fixed telephone service customers using direct access, a slight increase of 0.6 per cent on the previous quarter and a 6 per cent rise on the same quarter of 2006. This increase was driven by new offers based on GSM technology and the packaged offers of fixed telephone and cable television and/or Internet that have been appearing in the market.
Concerning indirect access using pre-selection, the number of customers fell by 2.5 per cent, to 382 thousand, confirming the reversal in the growth trend seen for this type of access. Compared to the same period of the previous year, the number of pre-selection customers fell by 21 per cent. The number of customers using call-by-call selection fell by 30.4% compared to the first quarter of the year and by 40.3 compared to the second quarter of the previous year. This trend can somewhat be attributed to the growing range of direct access offers from the alternative operators.
PT Group's share of direct access customers fell by 2.6 per cent compared to the previous quarter and by 13.3 per cent compared to a year earlier, to stand at 70.9 per cent by the end of the second quarter. This fall is a result, not only of the new offers of the alternative providers, but also of accesses with the SLRO activated.
In the indirect access modes, the remaining providers continue to hold a market share close to 99 per cent, a figure that has been steady since the liberalisation of the Fixed Telephone Service.
The total number of main telephone accesses installed at customer request stood at 4.2 million at the end of the 2nd quarter, a penetration rate of approximately 39.2 accesses per 100 inhabitants, and a slight increase in the number of accesses (1.2 per cent) over the previous quarter.
In this quarter the number of installed public payphones stood at approximately 42.6 thousand, a fall of about 0.9% compared to the previous quarter and a fall of 3.9% year-on-year.
Traffic originating on the fixed network during the first quarter totalled around 2.1115 billion minutes resulting from 712 million calls.
Compared to the previous quarter, the number of minutes fell by 2.1 per cent while the number of calls fell by 1.3 per cent. The figure is significantly lower than that recorded the year before, both in terms of the number of minutes and in terms of call volume, which fell by 6 per cent. This fall in traffic has been heavily impacted by the sharp fall in dial-up internet access traffic (down 57.7 per cent in terms of minutes and down 49.5 per cent in terms of calls year-on-year) in the face of the strong expansion of internet access using broadband technologies.
The companies of PT Group saw their share of voice traffic continue its downward trend during the quarter, both in terms of minutes (69 per cent in the second quarter of 2007, 0.5 per cent less than in the previous quarter) and in terms of the number of calls (68.7 per cent in the second quarter of 2007, 0.6 per cent less than in the previous quarter).
In the last year, the new providers have seen their share rise by around 2.4 per cent in terms of minutes and 2.3 per cent in terms of calls.
Consult:
- Postal services https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?categoryId=277884
See also:
- Number of direct access customers increases in first quarter of 2007 https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=491649
