At the end of 4th quarter 2011 (4Q11), there were around 2.2 million customers with fixed Internet access in Portugal, of which 2.19 million were broadband accesses, 18 thousand more than in the previous quarter, representing a growth rate of 0.8 percent. Compared to the same quarter of 2010, the number of broadband customers rose by 5.3 percent. Meanwhile, mobile services reported around 2.9 million customers who actually used mobile broadband Internet, an increase of 8.5 percent compared to 3Q11 and an increase of 14 percent compared to 4Q10. Cards/modem accounted for 1.13 million accesses out of the total.
ADSL remains the main technology for fixed broadband Internet access, representing 49.1 percent of the total, although it has lost 13.5 percentage points from the peak reached in 4th quarter 2006. ADSL is followed by cable modem with 40.3 percent of accesses, and optical fibre (FTTH/B) with 10.6 percent.
In terms of fixed broadband accesses, Grupo PT retained a share of 49.4 percent, an increase of one percentage point over the previous quarter.
In terms of mobile broadband access customers using via card/modem, TMN's share was reported at 41.8 percent (+0.9 percentage points over the previous quarter), followed by Optimus (-1.4 percentage points) and Vodafone (+0.9 percentage points) with 29.3 and 25.3 percent, respectively.
However, the number of cards actually used to access the Internet has fallen for the fifth consecutive quarter.
Broadband Internet access traffic increased by 15 percent in 4Q11, due in the most part to growth in fixed broadband traffic (+15.3 percent) which represents approximately 95.8 percent of the total, while mobile Internet access traffic grew by 9.5 percent. The traffic generated by mobile accesses using cards/modem represents about 95.5 percent of total mobile broadband Internet access traffic.
Revenues in 2011 (fixed Internet access as a stand-alone service and bundles of services including this service) reached a total of 964.1 million euros. Of this amount, 191.4 million euros (19.8 percent) corresponds to stand-alone offers, 88.1 million euros (9.2 percent) derive from double-play offers and the remaining 684.6 million euros (71 percent) from triple-play offers.
Revenues from the mobile Internet access service totalled 353 million euros in 4Q11, 6.2 percent lower than reported over the same period of 2010.
