LISBON: Fixed line telephone revenues surged 17.4 percent in the first quarter of this year to reach €448 million with the quantity of telephone accesses experiencing its sharpest increase in the last five years, the regulator Anacom said in its quarterly report released Monday.
The telephone access penetration rate registered its largest year-on-year rise since 2010 with 67,000 more individual accesses taking the monthly rate to 44.6 accesses per 100 inhabitants with the three-month period seeing a total of 4.66 million accesses.
In the first quarter, each of those accesses represented the consumption of 98 minutes in fixed line to fixed line phone calls, ten minutes calling mobiles and eight minutes of international telephone utilisation, all slightly down in quarterly terms given the festive heavy previous quarter.
ANACOM also stated that at the end of March, communication accesses made beyond the fixed line network, whether via mobile or optical fibre or 4G, accounted for 48.3 percent of telephone based access, up 0.8 percent on the end of 2014 and 4.5 percent higher than a year ago.
Telecommunications operator MEO provided 52.6 percent of the main access total, down 1.4 percent on the end of 2014 whilst NOS stepped up its market share by 1.1 percent to stand on 31.8 percent and with Vodafone attaining a 0.7 percent increase to reach a market share of 10.3 percent with a total number of 3.77 million clients. 79.4 percent of all fixed line phone calls take place within the scope of multiple play service packages and thus at reduced cost.
