The Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) today released its Quarterly Key Data Report on the Electronic Communications market for the period (1 October to 31 December), Q4 2019.
Fixed broadband subscriptions increased to 1.463 million, a 0.1% increase this quarter and an increase of 2% compared to Q4 2018. Of these, 162k were FTTP subscriptions representing 11.1% of total fixed broadband subscriptions in Q4 2019, up from 6.3% in Q4 2018.
According to Eurostat, in 2019 Ireland’s household penetration rate (including fixed and mobile broadband) at 90% is higher than the EU average of 89%.
Average advertised fixed broadband speeds continue to increase. In Q4 2019 approximately 81.9% of all fixed broadband subscriptions were equal to or greater than 30Mbps up from 77.2% in Q4 2018. Of all fixed broadband subscriptions 36.2% were equal to or greater than 100Mbps, up from 29.6% in Q4 2018.
Total voice traffic minutes decreased by 1.4% this quarter and were 6.7% lower than in Q4 2018. Mobile minutes form the majority of voice minutes at 83.7%, with fixed minutes representing the remaining 16.3%. Mobile voice minutes decreased by 0.9% while fixed voice minutes decreased by 4.3% this quarter.
On a monthly basis an average mobile voice subscriber used 198 minutes (-6.8% annual decrease), sent 56 texts (-19.2% annual decrease) and used 7.7GB of data (+20.9% annual increase).
Of all mobile subscriptions 60% were actively using 4G networks in Q4 2019, up from 56.5% in Q4 2018. Total mobile subscriptions (including mobile broadband and machine-to-machine) increased to 6.65 million in Q4 2019 driven by a rise in post pay subscriptions which now represent 62% of all mobile subscriptions.
Machine-to-machine (M2M) subscriptions increased to 1,206,513, a 19.2% annual increase and made up 18.1% of all mobile subscriptions in Q4 2019.
The full Quarterly Key Data Report for Q4 2019 is available here.
