At the end of the fourth quarter of 2010, Portugal had about 16.47 million active mobile stations associated with post-paid, pre-paid and hybrid tariff plans, 2.1 percent more than in the previous quarter. Of these, around 81.9 percent saw actual use in the last month of the quarter, around 0.1 percentage points less than in the third quarter of 2010.
In the quarter under review, modalities of mobile service subscriptions (MS) were distributed as follows: the total pre-paid plans represented 72.1 percent, post-paid plans around 15.6 percent and combined/hybrid plans around 12.3 percent. It is noted that the percentage of active post paid-plans but not actually used is 25.9 percent with one operator reporting a significantly higher value. This may be due to cards/modems being counted under this category.
If the number of active cards/modems exclusively used for broadband Internet access is excluded from the total of mobile stations, the number of active mobile stations and user devices in actual use is reported at 12.2 million, 292 thousand more than in the previous quarter.
At the end of December, the penetration of mobile service was reported at 154.9 per 100 inhabitants. However, the interpretation of this value and the number of subscribers must take into account that there are users who have more than one service access card. According to the most recent consumer survey of electronic communications conducted by ANACOM, about 20 percent of consumers of this service have more than one active card.
As for the number of eligible users of broadband services, it was reported at around 10.5 million, by the end of December.
The number of active users who actually used services which are characteristic of 3rd generation (video-telephony, broadband data transmission, mobile TV) registered around 4.1 million, an increase of 8.6 percent compared with the previous quarter.
Users who are eligible to use broadband services (UMTS/HSPA) represented 63.7 percent of the total active mobile stations, while active users represented 30.2 percent of all mobile stations in actual use.
Of the total users of broadband service who recorded traffic in the last month of the period being reported, around 31.4 percent are users of the mobile broadband Internet access service using cards/modems.
In the fourth quarter, there were around 2.25 billion calls made, 0.1 percent less than in the previous quarter. In recent years, there has been a decrease in the number of calls in fourth quarter compared with the previous quarter. However, the total number of calls made is within the limits of the forecast range resulting from the historical trend and the estimated seasonal effects.
Compared with the same period of 2009, there was an increase of 6.8 percent in the number of calls, a figure significantly higher than the rate of growth in the number of active mobile stations. This growth was influenced mainly by the growth of on-net calls, which now represent 71 percent of outgoing traffic - an increase of 3.7 percentage points over the period immediately preceding the introduction of plans which allow free calls between subscribers.
During the period under review, the number of calls received on the mobile network was 2.19 billion, a value which represents an increase of 0.4 percent over the previous quarter and an increase of 4.3 percent year-on-year. Fixed-mobile traffic saw a significant fall compared to the previous quarter (-4.2 percent), strengthening the trend evident in recent years.
During the fourth quarter of 2010, more than 6.7 billion text messages were reported, an increase of 2 percent compared with the previous quarter and an increase of 5.9 percent over the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of value-added messages exceeded 20 million, equivalent to 0.3 percent of the total SMS sent.
As for multimedia messaging, users of mobile service sent nearly 34 million MMS, a decrease of 1.3 percent compared with the previous reporting period. In annual terms, the number of MMS sent by users increased by 40.2 percent.
There were around 1.05 million video-calls made, a decrease of 21.5 percent over the previous quarter. As for the number of users of the mobile TV service was around 57.4 thousand (1.4 percent of the total of mobile stations with actual use of 3G services). Over the previous quarter, there is a decrease of around 7.1 percent in the number of users.
Consult the statistical report:
- Mobile Services - 4th quarter 2010 https://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=1077207
