Boom in mobile phones, satellite receivers

A total of 252,670 people, or 64 per cent of the population, now own a mobile phone, according to statistics released yesterday by the National Statistics Office.

The statistics, compiled by the NSO with the cooperation of Eurostat, show an increase of 79.2 per cent in mobile phone customers between March, 2001 and March this year. This means the number of mobile phone customers has increased from 36.1 per cent (141,006) of the population to 64 per cent.

Internet subscriptions increased by 38.5 per cent within the same period, reaching 57,157 compared to the 41,538 subscribers registered a year earlier.

The statistics also show that the number of satellite receivers more than doubled within a year. The satellite sector saw an increase of 23.1 per cent from the previous quarter and 103.5 per cent over the 12 months leading up to March. In March, 2001, 5,561 people had a satellite receiver. By March this year that figure had gone up to 11,315.

Cable subscriptions also increased, from 83,819 to 90,374 within a year.

The number of pager users has decreased from 5,199 to 4,746.

Malta's statistics were also compared with the 15 European countries and the candidate countries.

Malta continued to close the gap on the European countries' average of 72.4 per cent penetration in the mobile telephony sector when compared with both the EU and the candidate counties (which registered an average of 31.2 per cent) for 2001.

Only Slovenia and the Czech Republic, with 75.8 and 65.9 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants respectively, have higher rates than Malta among the candidate countries.

Internet users in Malta increased to 25.4 per cent of the total population during 2001, a net increase of 12.1 per cent from 2000. When compared with the other candidate countries, during 2001, Malta again came third after Estonia (30.1 per cent) and Slovenia (30 per cent).

The EU countries' average in internet users amounted to 31.4 per cent for 2001. But Malta had a higher percentage of internet users than Greece (12.1 per cent), Portugal (12.5 per cent), Spain (17.7 per cent), France (18.4 per cent) and Italy (25.2 per cent).