The Swedish Telecommunications Market First Half Year 2010 - PTS-ER-2010:26

25/11/2010

In recent years it has been predicted that the number of outgoing traffic minutes from mobile networks would exceed those from the fixed networks. This has now happened – and calculations by the Swedish Post and Telecom Agency (PTS) show that this occurred in early May 2010. In total, approximately 10.3 billion minutes were called from fixed networks and 11.0 billion from the mobile networks, which means that 52 per cent of the outgoing traffic came from mobile networks. However, the total number of outgoing voice traffic minutes lies at the same level, about 21.5 billion, during the first half-year of 2010 as during the preceding half-year. Ten years ago traffic from mobile networks was less than 10 per cent of all outgoing call traffic.

The number of subscriptions for fixed telephony continued to fall and was just over 5 million at the end of June 2010; of these, 1 million were subscriptions for IP-based telephony. The total number of mobile subscriptions increased by 8 per cent over a year and was 12.2 million on 30 June 2010. Ten years ago there were about as many subscriptions for fixed and mobile telephony (approximately 6 million of each). Since then the number of subscriptions for fixed telephony has reduced by 1 million subscriptions (just more than 15 per cent) while the number of subscriptions for mobile call services has increased by almost 5 million (85 per cent).

There were 4.5 million broadband subscriptions on 30 June 2010. Two-thirds of these, that is to say 3 million, were subscriptions for fixed broadband while one-third, 1.5 million, were subscriptions for mobile broadband. This rapid growth of mobile broadband means that the mobile operator Hi3G now has 6.5 per cent of the market shares for broadband subscriptions. Four years ago this operator was not even in the broadband market. At the end of June 2010, 45 per cent of broadband subscriptions had a transmission capacity of 10 Mbit per second or more downstream.

There were in total 5 million television subscriptions in the Swedish market on 30 June 2010, of which 429 000 subscriptions were for IPTV and 2.2 million were subscriptions for other digital television.

A brief description is provided in this report of the development in the retail market for electronic communications in Sweden during the first half-year of 2010. Comparisons are mainly made with corresponding periods in previous years. Statistics are available in tables on PTS’s statistics portal (statistik.pts.se), where the data of individual operators is also available.