The latest edition of the Communications Market Review for the period January – June 2010, just published by the Malta Communications Authority, shows a steady development of the Maltese communications sector and a continued sign of maturity, already evident in the previous report.
Although the report gives a lot of figures about the use of electronic and postal communication, it is the comparison between this year’s statistics and those of previous years that really tells the story. And the news is that dial-up internet access is dead but fixed-line telephony is not, small internet service providers have disappeared and internet access is actually cheaper and of good quality, given the low number of complaints lodged.
Fixed-line telephony in Malta has not been killed by mobile telephony. Fixed-line subscriptions increased slightly this year though traffic was down. The cost of a minute of fixed line communications in Q2 2010 was, on average, €0.015 for a call to another fixed-line number, €0.217 for a fixed-to-mobile call, and €0.086 for a fixed-to-international call. While Go, the incumbent, continues to dominate this market, Melita continues to eat at Go’s share at a rate of two per cent a year.
At the end of last June there were 439,536 mobile subscriptions, representing an increase of 1.2 per cent over the corresponding figure in 2009. The number of subscriptions exceeded the number of people in Malta last year, but the trend here is that users are making more phone calls, talking longer, and sending more SMSs. However the number of premium SMSs that deliver a form of content or service has been going down at a steady rate in the last couple of years, probably the result of more users switching to internet-based services on their smartphones.
In Q2 2010, the cost of a minute of mobile communications (excluding outbound roaming) was, on average, €0.113 for a domestic call and €0.693 for an international call.
In terms of market share, Melita Mobile continued to penetrate Go’s and Vodafone’s subscriber base and no single operator has more than 50 percent of the market. Vodafone remains the leader with 48.55, followed by Go Mobile with 42.79 and Melita Mobile with 6.73. Redtouch Fone, the small operator that uses the infrastructure of a larger operator, stood at 1.93 per cent.
Internet access in Malta continued to grow in the first half of 2010 and 28.4 per cent of the population have a fast broadband connection.
We have several trends here. First of all we can pronounce the slow dial-up service as dead. There were only 169 subscriptions in June 2010. Secondly, we can also pronounce the death of the small internet service providers, whose market share shrank from around 10 per cent two years ago to just 2.5 per cent last June. When this is summed up to the significant increase in market share by Go, today the largest ISP in Malta after usurping Melita’s top spot, it shows how the small ISPs were strangled by competition. This is also confirmed by the fact that around 41 per cent of all broadband subscriptions formed part of a bundle which only the large communications providers can offer.
Another important fact that emerges from the figures of the MCA report is that the price of internet access has gone down when you calculate the rate per megabit/second (the connection download speed). This varies from 8.2 per cent to as much as 30.8 per cent and this affected the vast majority of subscribers.
By the end of June the number of pay TV subscriptions totalled 143,186, an increase of 7.8 per cent over the corresponding figure in 2009. Subscriptions on the digital platform accounted for 86.3 per cent of all subscriptions, and the remaining 13.7 percent were analogue and the latter continued to decrease in number.
The number of pay TV subscriptions on the cable digital platform (Melita) totalled 71,029 and those on the DTTV platform (Go) totalled 52,499. Furthermore, around 35 per cent of all pay TV subscriptions as at the end of June 2010 were bundled with some other electronic communications product or service. When this is linked to the bundling of internet access services it goes to explain the dominance of the three national communications providers to the detriment of smaller players.
Melita held an overall market share of 63.3 per cent of all pay TV subscriptions, down from 79.5 per cent since the end of Q2 2008. On the other hand, Go improved its overall market share of pay TV subscriptions by 16 percentage points since the end of Q2 2008, up from 20.5 per cent to 36.7 per cent as at the end of Q2 2010.
The digital terrestrial TV switchover early next year will not affect in any way Melita’s or Go’s subscribers. The MCA’s report does not give any statistics regarding the number of Maltese TV viewers still using the analogue terrestrial system which will be switched off next year.
Total mail volumes handled in the first half of 2010 totalled 21.5 million items, up from 21.3 million in the first half of 2009. This improvement is attributable to more letter post items and parcel mail items handled during the period, outweighing declines in bulk mail items and registered mail items.
During the first six months of this year, 100 complaints were filed with the MCA. The largest single type of complaint was about mobile telephony (35 per cent), followed by pay TV (24) and fixed-line telephony (15). The low percentage of complaints on internet access, 10 per cent, reflects the high level of internet access service enjoyed right now.