Voice call minutes in Irish telecoms market decline 25% in a year

Minutes spent on phone calls in the Irish telecommunications market declined 25 per cent in the third quarter of 2023 compared with the same quarter last year, according to the latest update from the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg).

The telecoms watchdog said total voice traffic minutes were also down 3.7 per cent compared with the second quarter of this year.

Calls originating from mobiles account for 89 per cent of the time spent on voice calls, generating 2.8 billion minutes in the three months from July to the end of September. This was down 25 per cent on the 3.17 billion minutes spent on mobile calls in the third quarter of 2022.

Fixed minutes, or landlines, represent the remaining 11 per cent of the market. These have dropped to 304.8 million minutes, down 24 per cent year on year.

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Fixed voice minutes surged during Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, but had fallen below their pre-pandemic level by the first quarter of 2022.

Average mobile voice subscribers used 138 voice minutes and sent 30 texts on a monthly basis, ComReg said, with the latter number dropping 20 per cent annually. The figures do not include the use of messaging services such as WhatsApp.

Average subscribers also used 13.9 GB of data a month, which marks a 5.9 per cent annual increase.

Fixed broadband subscriber lines increased to 1.64 million, an increase of 2.8 per cent compared with the third quarter of 2022. Of these, nearly 620,000 were fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) subscriber lines, or the fastest possible in the market.

On a monthly basis, an average residential fixed broadband subscriber line used 403.9 GB of data, an increase of 9.7 per cent since the third quarter of last year.

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