Romania is one of the European countries where mobile phone services are extremely cheap, the number of subscriptions and cards growing at a fast pace in recent years, according to ANCOM. ANCOM claims that in the middle of 2017, 22.2 million active cards of users of mobile telephony services were registered in Romania, and here we are talking about subscriptions and prepaid cards active in the country.
Of the 22.2 million active cards in Romania in mid-2017 (1.5% less than in S1 2016), 11.8 million were used with subscriptions and 10.4 million with prepaid cards. The number of mobile phone subscriptions in S1 2017 is 7% higher than in S1 2016, while in the case of prepaid cards we are talking about a 10% decrease in the number of active cards in Romania.
Of the 11.8 million cards that are active with subscriptions, 9 million are used by individuals, their number increasing substantially compared to the same period last year. The increase in the number of natural persons who have mobile phone subscriptions has also generated an increase in the total number of active prepaid cards in our country, in the case of natural persons the figures are stagnant.
Romania. here are how many Romanians use mobile phone services
In S1 2017, 34.3 billion minutes were spoken in Romania, 4% less than in the same period of 2016, a sign that the appetite for talking on the phone has somewhat decreased. Despite this, voice traffic from own network to another mobile network increased by 12% to 11 billion minutes, compared to other traffic categories, while traffic within the same fell by 11%.
The number of minutes spoken abroad also decreased, by 6%, as did that of numbers spoken from mobile to landline, here the decrease is 1% in S1 2017 compared to S1 2016. In the case of SMS messages, we are also talking about a 16% decrease in traffic, reaching 8 billion messages, and this is because of messaging applications that are used much more often at the expense of standard technology.
Finally, in Romania the usual user of mobile phone services talked for 4 hours and 14 minutes and sent 59 SMS messages, so we are talking about quite normal traffic. These statistics were recorded by ANCOM in Romania in the first 6 months of 2017 and show a rather interesting situation regarding the consumption of mobile phone services in the country, VoIP and messaging applications seriously reducing consumption for Romanians.
