The President of the National Regulatory Authority for Communications, Ion Smeeianu, presented today, April 21, in the opening of the conference “Communications Day”, a series of preliminary results of a set of market studies conducted between January 1, 2004 – March 15, 2004 on end users and providers of electronic communications services in Romania.
The main objective of ANRC analyses is to collect accurate information about the communications market and the behaviour of the end users. In collaboration with a specialized agency, the authority carried out a series of researches on the retail markets of fixed telephony, mobile telephony, Internet and leased lines services. Based on the data, the retail markets will be identified, and ANRC will also identify providers with significant power on these markets and impose specific obligations, where deemed necessary.
As regards the use of telephony services, from a total of almost 7.5 million households with a representative rural-urban distribution at national level, a percentage of 52.5% of the households use their own fixed telephony line and 2.8% use international telephony cards. Fixed telephony penetrations rates at urban and rural level are as follows:
| Use of telephony – Households | Rural | Urban | Total |
| % | |||
| Fixed telephony line | 16.8 | 82.8 | 52.5 |
| Mobile telephony | 21.7 | 68.7 | 47.1 |
| Fixed telephony cards | 31.1 | 35.2 | 33.3 |
| International telephony cards | 0.7 | 4.5 | 2.8 |
*Universe: The total number of households in Romania, according to the 2002 Population and Households Census, issued by the National Institute for Statistics
Among the communications solutions used by the business sector, the most often used are classic fixed telephony services (94.8%) and mobile telephony (87.6%), followed by VoIP telephony services (1.7%), VoIP fixed telephony through VPN (1.2%), and VoIP fixed telephony through subscriptions other than VPN (1%). As regards the newly entered providers of fixed telephony services, 1.4% of the companies from the business sector answered that they use the services of Atlas Telecom, 1.1% use the services of RDS and 0.4% Astral Telecom. Also, 1.7% of the interviewed companies indicated the use of telephony services provided by other alternative telephony providers.
The research was conducted on groups that, at national level, are considered representative for the analysed population. The correctness of the collected data is sustained by the fact that the method for selecting the investigated population for each study took into account certain fundamental criteria, such as the urban–rural distribution of the Romanian user of electronic communications services and the profile of the user from the point of view of environment, sex, income, occupation, household size.
The presentation of the President of ANRC can be accessed on ANRC website.