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Italians and the media: fast Internet boom, newspapers down

According to Agcom's quarterly Observatory on Communications, the lockdown has accelerated the demand for ultra-fast connections. Rai resists, Iliad has conquered 6% of the mobile market

Italians and the media: fast Internet boom, newspapers down

Has the lockdown changed our habits in using communication channels, from the Internet to TV, from social networks to newspapers? A little yes, and as told by the Observatory on Communications, disseminated by the Authority for Guarantees in Communications and updated at the end of June. Meanwhile, there was a boom in ultra-broadband. In fact, if in June 2016 86,5% of accesses to the fixed network were in copper, after four years these dropped to 41,2% (with a drop of 9,4 million lines). At the same time, accesses through qualitatively superior technologies have significantly increased, in particular those in optical fiber: FTTC (+7,05 million units), FTTH (+1,06 million thousand) and FWA (+620 thousand).

This dynamic was clearly reflected in a increased performance in terms of connection speed marketed by companies: in four years, lines with speeds equal to or greater than 30 Mbit/s have in fact gone from less than 11% to 62% of the total of broadband and ultrabroadband lines, whose competitive framework largely sees Tim as the largest operator in Italy. In the mobile network segment, the overall number of SIMs dropped by almost a million to 103,6 million: but on closer inspection, M2M SIMs (i.e. those from smartphones or tablets) grew by 2,8 million, while they were the "voice only ” and “voice+data” which decreased by 3,6 million units. Even on mobile Tim is the first operator, but the fight with the other players is tight: the market shares of Vodafone and Wind Tre are very close and even Iliad has already reached 6%.

With Covid we therefore needed to connect more, and above all ever faster connections: for teleworking, for distance learning, to occupy the time spent at home by downloading films and TV series, to enable the so-called "Internet of things". As regards the use of the internet in the month of June, i.e. with the lockdown now over, 43 million average daily users surfed the net for a total of 64 hours of monthly surfing per person. And the desire for freedom has penalized social networks: Facebook, with almost 37 million unique users, marks a quarterly contraction of 4 percentage points. Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter are also down, while despite the easing of the measures to contain the epidemic, the growing trend continues for Pinterest, visited in June by 16,7 million unique users (+12,2 percentage points) and Tik Tok, now used by 6,6 million users (+20,5 percentage points).

On the other hand, with regard to the television sector, compared to June 2019 Rai, despite the contraction of its share (-0,8 percentage points), continues to maintain leadership with a share of 34%; in second place, Mediaset, which with 3,2 million viewers on an average day, recorded an increase (0,8 percentage points) and reached a share of 31,8%. On the other hand, negative performances were recorded by Comcast/Sky (-1 percentage point) and La7 by the Cairo Communication Group (-0,4 percentage points). In the publishing industry the negative trend already highlighted is confirmed in the previous Agcom Observatories: in June 2020, the sale of newspapers (hard copies and digital copies) amounted to approximately 2,1 million copies, down by 25% on an annual basis. With reference to the entire period considered (June 2016 - June 2020), the total daily hard copies sold by the main publishers almost halved, going from around 2,3 to 1,3 million units. But this has been the order of things for years now.

The real problem if anything is that contextually also digital copies are in sharp decline, if we consider the entire period (-21% percentage points), and an increase only if we consider the values ​​of June 2019 (+11 percentage points).

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