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Revenue per user rates (ARPU) for Irish customers are the second highest in Europe, according to the ODTR quarterly report released on Friday.
The report said that an independent survey had found that Irish people have an ARPU (average revenue per user) of just over USD40 per month, which is second only to Switzerland with USD43. Such a figure gives weight to what many Irish people have felt regarding perceived high charges set by mobile operators in the Irish market. The ODTR said the new charges to be introduced by Vodafone and O2 for mobile termination rates in the coming months may help to reduce call rates as well as ARPU figures.
The ODTR report, which covers the period from 01 January to 31 March, also found that Ireland's mobile penetration rate of 77 percent (or 2.97 million subscribers) has remained flat since the quarter before. However, there was good news for operators with SMS continuing to deliver important revenue for them. Irish mobile users sent over half a billion SMS messages during the quarter. On average, mobile subscribers are sending 62 SMS messages a month.
The report also contains welcome news for telecom operators with demand for broadband services likely to remain high for the next 12 months. According to a survey carried out for the report, 61 percent of businesses anticipate that their broadband requirements will change over the next year and around half plan to upgrade their bandwidth further. Businesses are more likely to take advantage of DSL (47 percent) and wireless broadband products (34 percent) in the future.
Ireland's Internet penetration rate, however, remains disappointing. Just 34 percent of the population are on-line and this figure has increased by just one percent from the previous quarter. It also means that Ireland continues to lag behind other countries such as Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Germany in terms of getting its citizens onto the Internet. But, 98 percent of Irish businesses use the Internet on a regular basis.
The country's communications sector continues to grow, albeit at a very slow rate. The ODTR report said that total revenues for fixed, mobile and broadcasting markets now stands at an estimated EUR3.21 billion per annum, which was a one percent increase since March 2001. The report added that that the majority of this growth was early in the year with revenues stabilising over the last couple of quarters.
Total fixed line revenue for the quarter was approximately EUR500 million, accounting for just over 60 percent of total telecommunications revenue, while fixed telephony retail traffic measured in minutes increased by approximately 6 percent since December 2001.
In the broadcasting sector, the ODTR estimated that there were approximately 615,000 cable and MMDS subscribers to basic television services in Ireland at the end of March 2002. This is a slight increase from the 613,000 in the previous quarter.
Five percent of the 615,000 had upgraded to digital by the end of the quarter, said the ODTR, bringing the total number of digital cable/MMDS and satellite digital subscribers in Ireland to around 260,000, which is around 20 percent of all households with a television.
The ODTR said that total cable and MMDS revenues have increased by approximately 16 percent since last quarter, but employee numbers in the sector had fallen in the sector by 12 percent since December 2001 to 880.
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