ComReg today released its Quarterly Key Data Report on the Electronic Communications market for the period (1 July to 30 September), Q3 2021.
The main findings are as follows:
- Fixed broadband subscriptions increased to 1.56 million, a 0.8% increase this quarter and an increase of 3.9% compared to Q3 2020. Of these, over 340k were fibre-to the-premises (FTTP) subscriptions representing 21.8% of total fixed broadband subscriptions in Q3 2021, up from 14.8% in Q3 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 329.9 GB of data, an increase of 4.3% since Q3 2020.
- In Q3 2021, approximately 86.2% of broadband subscribers had purchased broadband with speeds equal to or greater than 30Mbps. Of all fixed broadband subscriptions 48.3% of subscribers purchased broadband speeds equal to or greater than 100Mbps.
- Total voice traffic minutes decreased by 5.2% this quarter, being 3.8% lower than in Q3 2020. Mobile minutes form the majority of voice minutes at 86.9%, with fixed minutes representing the remaining 13.1%. Mobile voice minutes decreased by 4.5% this quarter, while fixed voice minutes decreased by 9.4%.
- On a monthly basis an average mobile voice subscriber used 215 minutes (-3.1% annual decrease) and sent 45 texts (2.7% annual increase).
- Total mobile subscriptions (including mobile broadband and machine-to-machine (M2M)) increased to 7.63 million in Q3 2021 – driven by a rise in post pay subscriptions which now represent over 68% of all mobile subscriptions. Increases in M2M & MBB subscriptions also contributed. 5G subscribers totalled 298k in Q3.
- M2M subscriptions increased to 1.99 million, a 36.5% annual increase and made up 26.1% of all mobile subscriptions in Q3 2021.
The Quarterly Key Data Report for Q3 2021 is available in the publications section. The full set of data and associated charts is available on the Data Portal.
