The Communications Regulatory Authority has published the Communications Observatory for the whole of 2023.
Let’s look at the situation relating to telcos.
Italian telcos in 2023
Fixed network and broadband
At the end of December, overall accesses in the fixed network showed a marginal decline (-16 thousand accesses) on a quarterly basis, settling at around 20.11 million lines. Copper lines decreased by approximately 186 thousand units on a quarterly basis and by 798 thousand compared to December 2022. In the last four years they have decreased by 5.72 million accesses. Although decreasing on an annual basis (-475 thousand lines), FTTC accesses represent approximately 49% of the overall customer base. The FTTH ones grew by 290 thousand units in the last quarter of the year and by 978 thousand on an annual basis, while compared to December 2019 the increase was 3.34 million lines. Fixed Wireless Access lines are increasing, albeit to a more limited extent (around 150 thousand units on an annual basis), which, at the end of December 2023, amounted to 2.11 million accesses. Overall broadband lines are estimated at approximately 18.95 million units, showing a slight increase on a quarterly basis (+22 thousand lines), and essentially unchanged on an annual basis; in 2023 the decline in DSL lines (-675 thousand units) was counterbalanced by the growth of lines using other technologies. The dynamics illustrated indicate a significant increase in performance in terms of marketed connection speed: lines with speeds equal to or greater than 100 Mbit/s rose from 40.3% at the end of 2019 to 73.4% in December 2023.
Worth highlighting is the growth in the weight of lines marketed with transmission capacity ≥1GB/s, which increased from 3.2 to 22.2% in the period 2019 – 2023. At the same time, the growth in data consumption continues: in terms of overall volume, daily traffic in 2023 marked a growth of 15.6% on an annual basis, marking, at the same time, a +120% compared to the corresponding value of 2019. This is reflected in the daily traffic per broadband line; the unit consumption data, in fact, more than doubled in the period 2019 – 2023, going from 4.23 to 8.52 GB per line on average per day.
The ranking by operators
For what concern competitive framework of broadband and ultra-broadband access, at the end of December 2023, Tim confirmed itself as the largest operator with 38.0% of accesses, followed by Vodafone with 16.4% and by Wind Tre and Fastweb with 14.2% and 13.7% respectively; followed by Tiscali (3.7%), Eolo (3.5%) and Sky (3.3%), but it should be noted that the latter, among the main players on the market, is the one that showed on an annual basis the greatest dynamism gaining 0.8 percentage points.
Mobile network
In the mobile network, at the end of December 2023, there are 108.5 million active SIM cards (Human and M2M), growing by just under 1.3 million units on an annual basis. In more detail, M2M sims show an increase of 1.2 million units, while that of Human (i.e. “voice only”, “voice+data” and “data only” involving human iteration) it was equal to approximately 60 thousand SIM cards.
The linee Human 86.5% are represented by residential users, while, with reference to the type of contract, just under 90% of cases fall into the “prepaid” category. In relation to overall SIMs, Tim is the market leader with 27.8%, followed by Vodafone with 27.1%, Wind Tre with 23.7% and Iliad which reaches 9.9%.
The ranking by operators
Considering only the segment of sim “human”, Wind Tre remains the main operator with 24.6%, followed by Tim with 24.1%, Vodafone with 21.7% and Iliad which, with a growth of 1.5 percentage points on an annual basis, reaches 13.7%; with lower shares, PostePay follows (5.4%), Fastweb (4.6%) and CoopVoce with 2.7%.
The “human” SIMs that produced data traffic during the last quarter of 2023 can be estimated at approximately 58.6 million, a value approximately 2 million units higher than the corresponding period of 2022.
Mobile data traffic in Italy
In 2023, daily mobile data traffic grew by 21.7% on an annual basis and by 245% compared to 2019. Correspondingly, the average daily unit consumption in the period January-December it can be estimated at approximately 0.78 GBup by 21.1% compared to 2022 and by over 230% compared to the corresponding period of 2019, when it was estimated at 0.23 GB.
Source agcom.it – Licensed photo Depositphoto