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.
