While the number of lines is still growing, revenues from the services are falling, due to decreasing prices and less usage of fixed lines. Fixed telephony revenues dropped by 3 percent in 2015 to EUR 1.22 billion, including EUR 300 million in the fourth quarter of 2015. Telecompaper expects these trends to continue in the coming years and forecasts a compound annual growth rate of 0.5 percent in connections and -2.1 percent in revenues over the period 2016-2020.
Telecompaper expects that consumers subscribing to VoIP with DSL and fibre broadband will compensate for the decrease in traditional telephony as well as the slow decline in cable phone lines. Especially KPN still has significant room to sell to its DSL broadband customers, as around 30 percent don’t have VoIP yet. As KPN’s price level for DSL/fibre VoIP is effectively zero compared to EUR 12-21 per month for traditional telephony, the revenues from fixed telephony will continue to decline.
Digital telephone lines in the Netherlands reached 5.55 million on 31 December 2015, driven by 4.2 percent annual growth in VoIP users on DSL networks and a 29.4 percent increase in VoIP subscribers on fibre. There are now almost 2.1 million VoIP subscribers on DSL and almost 800,000 over fibre. Over the same period, cable networks lost 0.8 percent of VoIP subscribers, for a total of almost 2.7 million lines.
