The highest ever number of text messages were sent by the Irish people in the last quarter as the half a billion barrier was breached, according to the Office of the Director of Telecoms Regulator’s (ODTR) quarterly report.
On average, Irish mobile subscribers are sending 62 SMS messages a month.
However, the ODTR’s Quarterly Report recorded that Irish mobile subscribers are paying the second highest APRU (Average Revenue per User) rates in Europe according to the results of a new independent survey.
Overall, the last quarter has showed that the mobile phone and home Internet penetration rates have stabilised while other licenced operators now have 21 per cent of the market of fixed line numbers.
Over the last year 260,000 households have switched from analogue to digital TV accounting for 20 per cent of households.
Revenues for the communications sector in Ireland now stand at €3.2 billion per annum, accounting for 2.72 per cent of Irish GDP
The survey also showed:
- ISDN is the predominant access technology used by Irish business.
- Respondents indicated that DSL and WLANs are access technologies that businesses will depend more on in the future.
- Of companies who have Wireless LANs four in ten had introduced it in the past 12 months.
- Of two-thirds of respondents who have been approached by alternative operators, 16 per cent have switched operator in the past year.
- The main purposes of broadband identified by Irish companies were inter-company data transfer (65 per cent), company website (35 per cent) and E-commerce transactions (27 per cent).
- Increased speed of Internet functions is the most widely mentioned advantage of having additional bandwidth.