One of the things to come out of the way the European Union is growing and admitting new members is that there no longer appears any kind of economic imperative to lay down new basic telco fixed lines.
The dominance of the cellphone in voice usage is so great that few of the poorer countries that have recently joined the EU, and especially those that previously lived under the control of the Soviet Bloc, have managed to build out any more fixed line infrastructure. Either people don’t see the need for a fixed line or they cannot afford one.
And a report out this week commissioned from TNS Opinion & Social by the European Commission, demonstrates this and many other curious features about the shape and landscape of the European Union telecommunications and broadcasting infrastructures. This is all revealed in a 33 page summary part of the Special Barometer for the EU called the E-Communications Household Survey.
In essence most people have a TV, and most have a phone, but in the countries that are recent members of the EU that phone is likely to be a mobile, and that means that broadband access is less likely.
But even in households that have fixed lines available to them, fixed mobile substitution is still happening at pace and overall fixed telephone ownership has fallen 1% since a year ago to 96% of homes, and has gone up 2% for mobile access to 82%.
One of the things this points to is a genuine appeal for wireless broadband in those countries, however it is achieved, by WiMAX or cellular technologies.
Austria, Finland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Hungary, Lithuania, Romania, only have between 30% and 40% of homes that have both fixed and mobile telephony access, the survey reveals,
The figures are broken into two numbers, a summary with the current 25 members or one with the new entrants, Croatia and Turkey added bringing the total countries to 27. In total these 27 account for 494 million people, around 60% greater than the US in pure numbers, if not in buying power.
Curiously it is some of these poorer countries where less people have the internet which used it more often when they are connected, for VoIP telephony. In total just 17% of Europeans who have an internet connection at home say that someone in their household uses the PC for making phone calls over the Internet, but this proportion is twice as large in the new Member States and in some cases more than 3 times as high.
Some 54% of European households have a computer, primarily a desktop computer and 34% of households which have an internet connection at home also have a wi-fi router, up some 8% over this time last year.
But in all only 29% of homes actually have a broadband internet connection, with 54% of these connecting using ADSL. Around 81% of these have installed anti-virus and some 60% anti-spam software, which testifies to the fact that this is probably the most rampant area for virus contamination in the world.
By comparison virtually all European households have a television, around 97% with 21% having a wide-screen TV and around half of these use a standard aerial for connection, rather than cable or satellite pay TV delivery systems.
Bundling has also begun to take an effect, with the user of any kind of bundle rising from 17% to 20% over the past year, the most common bundle being telephony with internet access.