Landline use ever-shrinking
Fixed telephony has seen a decline in speaking time amounting to 45% compared to 2015
Landline telecommunications have been in continuous decline in recent years in Greece with the advent of cellphones, according to the data of the National Telecommunications and Posts Commission (EETT).
In 2023, based on the latest available data from the independent authority, the total revenue from the supply of fixed telephony and internet fell by 28.2 million euros, to €1.38 billion from €1.41 billion in 2022. Compared to 2015 the approximately 5 million fixed telephone lines are used about 45-46% less.
The decrease in the use of landline phones, which is available as part of a combination package of telephony and internet (double play) and pay TV (triple play), is confirmed by the duration of phone calls, which is constantly decreasing. Last year for the first time, the total length of calls was close to the psychological limit of 10 billion minutes. That is 10.2 billion minutes or 170 million hours, having fallen by about 10% compared to 2022. If compared to 2015, the duration of calls to landlines last year fell by about 42%.
Also, the duration of local and long-distance calls was 7.8 billion minutes or 130.2 million hours in 2023, having decreased by 11.3% year-on-year.
Consumers are increasingly turning not only to mobile calls, but also to communication through applications that allow messaging and making online calls at no additional cost.
Therefore, although in 2023 mobile voice calls fell by 5.6% to 36.8 billion minutes, data consumption increased by 73% to 1.5 trillion data.
The long-term decline in the use of the fixed telephony network and the rise of the internet has systematically directed providers to the provision of combined fixed and mobile services. As a result, worldwide, the value of this market, where fixed and mobile communications are combined, is expected to increase by 12.57%, to approximately €5 trillion by 2029.
At the same time, with the coverage of fifth-generation (5G) networks constantly expanding, the replacement of the fixed network by 5G is gaining ever more ground.
