Ed Achterberg on what happened in 2009 in the Dutch Telecom Scene.

Ed Achterberg on what happened in 2009 in the Dutch Telecom Scene.

Growth has gone out of the broadband market. FTTH is growing slowsly. DSL has lost its steam and Cable has taken the initiative. DSL can only compet on price or on extra services. KPN is doubting between dSL and Fiber. On December 15^th KPN will announce what she will do with DSL or Fiber.

UPC and Ziggo are offering the fastest speeds and DSL is the slowest technology. Also because the advertised speeds are up-to 20mbit/s. Glass fiber is out of this chart as the average speed is much higher than the 3 mbit/s max limited. 40% of the installed base of Cable is stuck already. If they go DSL they go back in speed and functionality.

The service revenue for mobile seems completely insensitive to the crisis. It seems to be… But is it really stable at 1,6 billion euro. KPN has slightly below 50%. It can’t become more or the OPTA will get mad and it won’t become less because KPN doesn’t want less. The total amount of active SIMS is much higher than our stats, because only KPN reports on its M2M installed base. ARPU is a very bad metric. What the consumer is paying for prepay is twice as much as what the operators are reporting as ARPU. The consumer is paying 12 euro, the telco reports 6, because of the amount of inactive SIMS. About 15% of the consumers have a databundle. And we see a growth.

Nokia is declining fast in the handset market. The Blackberry has become very popular with the youth segment. Blackberries can send free SMS’s called pings. Kids love those! Nokia has lost 25% of its market share in the Netherlands. From 42% to 34%.

In the television market we see that KPN’s Digitenne is flat. IPTV over DSL grows slowly. The wholesale offer analogue cable is an interesting proposition for Tele2. Television over Fiber is still difficult as many people keep their cable connection because of the abundance of channels and content and people only use fiber to connect to the net and telephony. HDTV is a great product and gives very little extra revenue. The average customer with an HDTV is willing to pay 3 euro extra for HDTV. Those without an HDTV capable tv are only willing to pay 1.50 euro.

Question: The Netherlands is the world leader in MVNO’s. What do you see there?

We see that everyone moves to smart pricing (making the contracts less transparent to the customer) For MVNO there is an opportunity there. MVNO’s can only distinguish themselves if they do more than just being cheaper. They could offer pico-cells.