Domestic quarterly mobile internet traffic exceeded 126 million GByte at the end of 2020, up from 100 million GByte a year earlier, according to the main indicators of mobile phone, mobile internet and mobile M2M services, from the latest mobile market report published by the National Media and Communications Authority (NMHH). Domestic telephone traffic increased 18 percent in one year to 7.1 billion minutes in the last quarter of 2020 compared to the same period last year.
The NMHH has a quarterly data provision obligation for the mobile market report, which is expanded with new data every six months, by the four service providers with their own mobile network, as well as by the mobile service providers that provide the service under a network contract with their own mobile network. The latest document [1] covers the period from the first quarter of 2017 to the fourth quarter of 2020.
An outstanding value in the report is that compared to the end of 2019, by the end of 2020, the average monthly data traffic per SIM card of residential subscribers increased by 42.8 percent, and that of non-residential subscribers by 12.4 percent. This represents a 35.3 percent increase in total domestic mobile Internet traffic of 126 million GByte in one year. Telephone call traffic also increased by nearly a fifth to 7.1 billion minutes, however, there was no significant difference between the residential and non-residential subscriber segments. The upward trend in roaming services, on the other hand, was spectacularly broken in 2020, especially from the second quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2020, only a third of SIM cards were used to make calls from abroad and four-tenths were accessed from abroad as a year earlier. At the same time, the average monthly roaming call and data traffic per roaming SIM card jumped drastically: the former almost tripled, from 40.9 minutes to 114.7 minutes, and the latter nearly 3.5 times from 0.8 Gbyte to 2.7 Gbyte .
The number of SIM cards did not change significantly during the four years under review, although the number of SIM cards handling the mobile market declined temporarily in the first half of 2020. At the end of 2020, the number of activated SIM cards was 11.5 million, while the number of SIM cards handling traffic was around 10.6 million. The share of post-paid cards rose from 60.2 per cent in the first quarter of 2017 to 69.5 per cent by the end of the period under review, to the detriment of pre-paid SIM cards. Within the mobile market, the market for mobile phone services is saturated, the number of SIM cards handling calls did not change significantly by 9.75 million at the end of 2020 during the presented period. 96 percent of total call traffic starts with a postpaid subscription.
The number of activated M2M (machine-to-machine) SIM cards, ie devices connected between devices without human intervention, increased by ten percent year-on-year to over 1.3 million in the second half of 2020.
Most voice calls and most of the data traffic also takes place on 4G
The role of the fourth-generation mobile service, ie 4G, in voice traffic is constantly growing, by the end of the period almost half of the call traffic – 47 percent – was on such a network, while at the end of 2019 this proportion was only 25 percent. The reason for the growth is probably not only the network development but also the fact that users are using more and more 4G-capable devices. By the end of 2020, 4G call traffic thus exceeded 3G traffic, which was nearly 46 percent. The share of 2G networks in voice calls is just over seven percent, down one percentage point from the end of 2019. Domestic mobile phone call traffic has also grown over the past year: billing subscribers have been talking for an average of more than five and a half hours (339 minutes) per month, and prepaid cards have been talking on their handsets for more than half an hour, according to Q4 2020 data. Compared to the last quarter of 2019, by the end of 2020, all SMS sent had decreased by 18.8 percent.
95 percent of total domestic mobile Internet traffic was transmitted over 4G by the end of 2020; 3G accounted for 3.6 percent and 2G for 1.5 percent. In the last four years, annual mobile Internet traffic has more than tripled, exceeding 474.4 million GByte per year at the end of 2020. Within this, data traffic in the smartphone segment, which accounts for two-thirds of total traffic, grew to 87.2 million Gbytes by the last quarter of 2020, an increase of 39.5 percent compared to the same period last year. At the end of 2020, a prepaid smartphone SIM card generated an average of 4.9 Gbyte of data traffic per month, while a pre-paid one generated 1.5.
National Media and Communications Authority (NMHH)
