More and more customers in Italy are choosing fiber. So many that for the first time, in terms of connections, ultra-broadband has surpassed broadband. According to the latest data from Agcom's Quarterly Observatory on Communications, to date lines above 30 Mb/s are 50,3 percent of the total broadband. The data - underlines the Authority - "highlight profound changes in the composition of the technologies used to supply the service".
Going into the details of the study, in June 2015 over 92% of accesses to the fixed network. Four years later we dropped to 52% (-8,4 million lines). At the same time, from June 2015 to June 2019 accesses "through other qualitatively better technologies" instead achieved constant growth: FTTC (+6,52 million units), FTTH (+720 thousand) and FWA (+690 thousand). Overall, the weight of broadband lines in xDSL technology is less than 45%.
“This dynamic – explains Agcom – is reflected in a increased network performance in terms of connection speed”. In percentage terms, lines with speeds below 10 Mbit/s in June 2019 fell to around 22% of broadband and ultrabroadband lines (it was 70% in June 2015), while those with speeds equal to or greater than 30 Mbit/s fell from 5,6 to 50,3% of broadband and ultrabroadband lines.
Speaking of individual companies, for broadband and ultrabroadband access, the main operator remains Tim (43,6% of accesses), followed by Vodafone (16,8%), and by Wind Tre and Fastweb (14,8% and 13,5% respectively).
Agcom also underlines that on the FTTH network (the fiber that goes straight to the house, to be clear) fiber accesses have exceeded 1 million units (+340 thousand in just one year) "thanks in particular to the growth of the services offered by Open Fiber and the migration processes towards FTTH access solutions proposed by Tim".
Switching from landline to landline mobile, the number of SIM cards grew by 3 million on an annual basis thanks above all to the M2m sim cards (+4,3 million units), while the "voice only" and "voice+data" ones decreased by 1,3 million units. Speaking of individual operators, TIm is still in first place (30,4%), followed by Vodafone and Wind Tre with shares around 29%. Iliad, in the first year of activity, managed to conquer 3,7% of the market. “However, if we consider only human sim cards, thus excluding M2m, the new operator reaches 4,7%, while Wind Tre, despite a share down by 3,1 percentage points on an annual basis, remains the main operator with 31,5%”, explains the Authority.
