LATEST FIGURES ON phone usage show that more than 3 billion texts were sent in Ireland from July to September of this year.

The figures come from ComReg’s Q3 report for the period, which also show that people are making more voice calls via mobile than using fixed land lines.

Overall communications industry revenues increased by 0.1 per cent this quarter, ComReg has said. However, total revenues in the 12 months to September 2012 at €3.72 billion were down from over €3.82 billion over the 12 months previous.

Broadband

There were over a million and a half (1,658,520) broadband subscriptions this quarter, which was an increase of 0.3 per cent from Q2 2012. Broadband subscriptions accounted for 99.3 per cent of all internet subscriptions in Q3 2012.

This is an increase of 0.4 per cent  since Q3 2011, and an increase of 0.3 per cent since last quarter. There was an increase in total fixed line subscriptions  this quarter (up by 8,164), but mobile broadband subscriptions fell again this quarter (down 3,801 subscriptions).

At the end of  September 2012, there were just over 1.67 million active internet subscriptions in Ireland, an increase of 0.02 per cent on the previous quarter but a 0.6 per cent increase on September 2011.

The total number of broadband subscriptions in Ireland for Q3 2012 was 1,658,520. Using fixed residential broadband subscriptions only, the estimated broadband household penetration rate as of Q3 2012 was 56.1 per cent.

Based on the total number of broadband subscriptions in Ireland  for Q3 2012,  the broadband per capita penetration rate (including mobile broadband) was 36.1 per. When mobile broadband is excluded, the penetration rate was 23.8 per cent.

Calls

There were 2,725,426,941 mobile calls made from July to September, compared to 1,451,916,001 fixed line calls. The calls decreased by 1.9 per cent from the previous quarter and have fallen by 5.0 per cent since the same period last year.

Vodafone has the biggest share of mobile subscriptions (39.8 per cent), followed by O2 (28.8 per cent), eircom group mobile (19.5 per cent), 3 (8.5 per cent) and Tesco mobile (3.4 per cent).

TV

There were 1,523,000 homes with TVs in Ireland in November 2012, and Irish terrestrial TV represented just 13.3 per cent of all of these homes. Cable or satellite platforms represented the remaining 86.7 per cent of all TV homes.

The number of TV homes fell in November 2012, but the percentage of digital TV homes increased from 40.6 per cent in September 2007 to 87.7 per cent in September of this year.

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