Consumers texting less but downloading more, says Comreg

Mobile and fixed-line customers in the €3 billion telecommunications market are using more data at faster download speeds, talking and texting less, and paying less for their services, according to the latest quarterly report from Comreg, the communications regulator.

Comreg’s report for the three months to the end of September shows fixed-line revenues surging ahead over the same period last year, up 3.8 per cent. The speeds available in Ireland are also ahead, with more than 62 per cent of customers accessing speeds of greater than 30 megabytes per second.

As websites churn out richer content, fixed-line data usage was up 33 per cent, while mobile data spiked 69 per cent over the same period last year.

Subscriber

The average residential fixed-line user consumed 116 gigabytes of data per month, while the average mobile subscriber used 3.4 gigabytes per month on their smartphone.

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“On a monthly basis an average mobile voice subscriber used 212 minutes (a 0.5 per cent annual increase), and sent 94 texts (16.8 per cent annual decrease),” said Comreg.

Voice traffic measured in minutes was down more than 5 per cent on fixed-line and 0.6 per cent on mobile. The 1.38 billion text messages sent over the quarter was down 16.4 per cent year-on-year as users increasingly turn to messaging services such as Whatsapp.

Fixed-line services

Eir is by far the market leader on fixed-line services, although its share slipped back to 48.2 per cent from 49.3 per cent. Vodafone leads the mobile market with a share of 42.4 per cent by revenues, with Three second on 33.8 per cent.

Average revenue per user (Arpu, a standard mobile industry metric) fell by about 80 cent a month to €24.32 as more customers bundled their mobile packages together with television and fixed-line services to obtain discounts.

Comreg said the Arpu reduction was also partly down to reductions in mobile roaming charges, which have been slashed within the EU, and network termination rates.