| NOTAS: | "Growth fell from 6.6% to 4.9%, taking into account all 27 countries included in the survey. In the 17 countries of Western Europe, the figure fell from 6% to 4.2%, while it continues to exceed 10% in the 10 EU accession countries.
In terms of activity, the developments observed in 2002 were repeated in 2003 in an even more marked fashion. The downward trend in the fixed sector became more pronounced in 2003, still under the impact of fixed-mobile substitution and the introduction of carrier selection for local traffic in many countries. The slowdown in the growth rate in the mobile sector is continuing, even though mobile services remain the main growth driver in telecom services. Lastly, the broadband sector continues to expand but the current size of this particular segment of the market is still too small to have any significant drag effect on the telecoms sector as a whole." |
