ComReg today released its Quarterly Key Data Report on the Electronic Communications market for the period (1 January to 31 March), Q1 2021.
Fixed broadband subscriptions increased to 1.54 million, a 1.5% increase this quarter and an increase of 4.2% compared to Q1 2020. Of these, over 279k were fibre-to the-premises (FTTP) subscriptions representing 18.1% of total fixed broadband subscriptions in Q1 2021, up from 12.2% in Q1 2020.
According to Eurostat, Ireland’s household broadband penetration rate (including fixed and mobile broadband) in 2020 was at 92%, which is higher than the EU average of 89%.
On a monthly basis an average fixed residential broadband subscriber used 400.1 GB of data, an increase of 45.6% since Q1 2020.
In Q1 2021, approximately 82.8% of broadband subscribers had purchased broadband with speeds equal to or greater than 30Mbps. Of all fixed broadband subscriptions 44.8% of subscribers purchased broadband speeds equal to or greater than 100Mbps.
Total voice traffic minutes increased by 0.4% this quarter, being 5% higher than in Q1 2020. Mobile minutes form the majority of voice minutes at 83.9%, with fixed minutes representing the remaining 16.1%. Mobile voice minutes increased by 0.1% this quarter, while fixed voice minutes increased by 2.1%.
On a monthly basis an average mobile voice subscriber used 224 minutes (4.1% annual increase), sent 37 texts (-30.4% annual decrease) and used 10.7GB of data (+14.2% annual increase).
Total mobile subscriptions (including mobile broadband and machine-to-machine (M2M)) increased to 7.18 million in Q1 2021 – driven by a rise in post pay voice and data subscriptions which now represent over 66% of all mobile subscriptions and M2M subscriptions.
M2M subscriptions increased to 1.63 million, a 25.9% annual increase and made up 22.7% of all mobile subscriptions in Q1 2021.
The Quarterly Key Data Report for Q1 2021 is available in the publications section here and on the Data Portal which contains the full set of data and associated charts.
