The growth in connections was driven by a 1 percent growth
in cable connections to 2.96 million, clearly off-setting a 0.4 percent quarterly
decrease in DSL connections to 3.16 million. At the same time, broadband via
fibre customers also grew by more than 8 percent to a market share of 7.3
percent. Telecompaper expects the broadband connections to continue to grow
during this year, although at a lower rate of 2.6 percent (compared with 3.1
percent in 2012), as more than 87 percent of the Dutch households have
broadband, leaving less room for growth.
KPN, including its XS4ALL and Telfort brands, was still the
largest broadband provider in the Netherlands with a 40.9 percent share of
subscribers at the end of December 2012, adding 2 percentage points during the fourth
quarter, mainly due to the acquisition of FTTH service providers Concepts ICT,
Edutel, KickXL and XMS. Excluding the acquisition, KPN’s market share would
have grown by 0.2 percentage points during the quarter. Ziggo was number two
with a market share of 26.6 percent, and UPC came third with 15.6 percent of
broadband subscribers.
