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Ireland Telecommunications Report Q1 2011
Business Monitor International, Nov 2010, Pages: 85
Business Monitor International's Ireland Telecommunications Report provides industry professionals and strategists, corporate analysts, telecommunication associations, government departments and regulatory bodies with independent forecasts and competitive intelligence on Ireland's telecommunications industry.
This update of BMI's Telecommunications Market Report on Ireland marks a move from annual updating to quarterly reporting. We have therefore provided a concise summary of developments covering the last 12 months and have extended to 2015 our forecasts for the country's fixed-line, internet/broadband and mobile communications markets. As before, there have been a number of notable developments in all sectors as operators have struggled to make headway amid the challenging business environment. There has been an increased emphasis on broadband provision over the last year as all four mobile network operators – Vodafone Ireland, O2 Ireland, Meteor and Hutchison 3G Ireland – have focused on growing their nascent 3.5G mobile broadband offerings. With BMI estimating more than 600,000 subscribers to such services as of mid-2010, it is clearer than ever that growth in the fixed broadband arena has all but run its course and that mobile is now the primary growth engine. This has not, however, translated into significant revenues for operators because overall revenues are falling – aided by a timely change in mobile termination rates (MTRs) in Q210 – and market saturation means that operators are having to heavily discount their services in order to attract new customers. BMI expects that the overall broadband subscriber base will reach 1.686mn by the end of 2010 and grow to serve 2.320mn by the end of our forecast period.
Hutchison revealed early in Q310 that it had been counting its subscriber numbers in a different way to that of its rivals and contrary to the regulator's requirements. It is now working to restate these figures and this may yet pull down our broadband and mobile forecasts. Even so, with mobile penetration rates at 124%, BMI feels that there is little additional scope for organic growth and that operators are right to look to improve their subscriber mixes in favour of postpay and mobile broadband plans. Although the market will continue to add new customers going forwards, growth will be nominal at best, reaching a total of 5.69mn subscribers by 2015.
eircom continues to dominate the fixed line market, despite inroads from operators such as Vodafone (which has now fully absorbed and integrated the assets of BT Ireland), TalkTalk and UPC Ireland; its 1.896mn access lines at the end of 2009 represented over 97% of all lines. eircom claims that its fixedline losses are being mitigated by increases in the number of its broadband customers, with those customers increasingly opting to use VoIP services. The fixed line market declined by 5.2% in 2009, accelerating year-on-year (y-o-y) and the downward trend seems set to continue in this vein over the next five years. BMI is predicting a 2% annual average rate of decline in the number of PSTN and ISDN lines. However, many of Ireland’s rural residents will continue to rely heavily on the national telephone network, so we are forecasting only small decreases in fixed lines for the latter part of our forecast period. By 2015, we are predicting that fixed-line penetration will have slipped to around 36%.
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