The number of fixed telephony lines in Italy dropped to 21.33 million at the end of June, or 500,000 less than a year earlier. Telecom Italia's share was down 2 percent to 63.5 percent, while Fastweb grew to 9.1 percent, and Tiscali was up to 1.9 percent, according to the latest quarterly report from regulator Agcom.
The retail broadband market grew by around 310,000 lines year-on-year and by 80,000 since March to 13.90 million. Telecom Italia lost 1.9 percent points compared to a year earlier to hit 49.9 percent of lines at end-June. This mainly went to Fastweb, up 1.3 points to 13.6 percent.
In the mobile segment, the customer base was up by 334,000 lines in the past year and grew by 140,000 lines on a quarterly basis to 92.68 million. The growth came entirely in postpaid, but prepaid still accounted for the bulk of the market, at over 74 million lines.
Telecom Italia's and Vodafone's mobile shares dropped each by 0.7 percent year-on-year to respectively 34.2 and 31.4 percent. 3 Italia grew to 10.3 percent, and Wind added 1.1 percent points year-to-year to reach 24.1 percent. The market share figures exclude MVNOS, which accounted for about 5.2 percent of the total market. Of the 5.1 million lines at MVNOs, just over half were at Poste Mobile.
The number of SMS exchanged dropped by 10 percent from Q2 2012 to 43.1 billion due to the growing use of chat applications, while voice traffic was still up 5.6 percent to 73.8 billion minutes. Mobile data users rose by 20 percent year-on-year to 34.3 million, and the number of USB modem users also continued to increase, up 25 percent to 8.6 million. Data traffic was up 33 percent from a year earlier.
Agcom also included data on the 'digital divide', with an estimated 2.4 million Italians unable to access broadband, representing 4 percent of the total population. The regions suffering the most from the digital divide are Molise, Basilicata and Calabria. The data supplied by the Ministry for Economic Development shows that of wireless networks are excluded, around 8.8 percent of Italians cannot access broadband.
