| Wednesday, August 11, 2004, during the press conference organised at the headquarters of the National Regulatory Authority for Communications, the President of ANRC, Ion Smeeianu, together with other representatives of ANRC, presented the evolution of the number of subscribers for the main types of electronic communications services between 2002 and 2003.
Thus, in this period, the main services provided by means of the public telephony networks registered an important rise, confirming the developing trend of the Romanian market of electronic communications. The mobile telephony market share increased considerably, by approximately 2 million subscribers, while the number of subscriptions for Internet services doubled within one year.
The number of minutes on international calls performed by means of the TDMA technology reported by ANRC decreased as compared to last year, which was due to the extensive use of VoIP solutions (reported to ANRC under the category of data transmission services). The decrease of the number of minutes on international calls performed by means of traditional technologies mirrors the changes due to the competition on the liberalized market of telephony services. The market share of the former unique operator of fixed telephony dropped last year, in the realm of international calls, from 100% to 77%. This operator diminished its market share for local and long distance calls by less than 1%, while its fixed-to-mobile calls segment decreased by 2%.“This is a perfectly natural process in the first year after liberalization, as the new operators choose this market share due to the low cost of initial investments and the greater profit margins”, Radu Tudorache, Economic Market Regulation Director of ANRC, declared.
“By the end of 2003, we registered over 906,000 Internet subscriptions and I would like to emphasize that such a subscription serves all the members of a family, a whole education institution, or an entire company. The 183 employees of ANRC eventually use a single Internet subscription”, Ion Smeeianu declared.
In 2002, the rate between the dial-up users and those using dedicated connections was approximately 3/1, while in 2003 this rate was balanced, as dedicated subscriptions reached 485,000 and dial up subscriptions reached 421,000. “This phenomenon is expanding and competition on these markets has proven to be an effective incentive. More and more Romanians, legal and natural persons, choose to use a quicker connection, a dedicated one, in order to benefit from all the advantages of Internet access for business purposes, for study or for entertainment”, the ANRC President also declared.
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