(Finance) – In 2023, daily mobile data traffic grew by 21.7% on an annual basis and by 245% compared to 2011.9. The average daily unit consumption in the January-December period can be estimated at approximately 0.78 GB, up by 21.1% compared to 2022 and by more than 230% compared to the corresponding period of 2019. This is what emerges from the AGCOM Communications Observatory.
Also on fixed networks, data consumption continued to grow: In terms of overall volume, daily traffic in 2023 grew 15.6% year-on-year, marking a +120% compared to 2019. This is reflected in the daily traffic per broadband line; the unit consumption data, in fact, more than doubled in the period 2019-2023, going from 4.23 to 8.52 GB per line on average per day. As regards the competitive framework of broadband and ultra-broadband access, at the end of December 2023, Tim confirms itself as the largest operator with 38% of accesses, followed by Vodafone with 16.4% and by Wind Tre and Fastweb with 14.2% and 13.7% respectively; followed by Tiscali (3.7%), Eolo (3.5%) and Sky (3.3%), but it should be noted that the latter, among the main players on the market, is the one that showed on an annual basis the greatest dynamism gaining 0.8 percentage points. There was also a significant increase in performance in terms of marketed connection speed: lines with speeds equal to or greater than 100 Mbit/s rose from 40.3% at the end of 2019 to 73.4% in December 2023. The growth in weight should be highlighted of lines marketed with transmission capacity =1GB/s, which went from 3.2 to 22.2% in the period 2019-2023
Even if in decline on an annual basis (-475 thousand lines), FTTC accesses represent approximately 49% of the overall customer base. FTTH ones grew by 290 thousand units in the last quarter of the year and by 978 thousand on an annual basis, while compared to December 2019 the increase is 3.34 million lines. Fixed Wireless Access lines are increasing, albeit to a more limited extent (around 150 thousand units on an annual basis), which, at the end of December 2023, amounted to 2.11 million accesses. At the end of December, overall accesses in the fixed network showed a marginal decline (-16 thousand accesses) on a quarterly basis, settling at around 20.11 million lines. Copper lines have shrunk by approx 186 thousand units on a quarterly basis and 798 thousand compared to December 2022. In the last four years, accesses have decreased by 5.72 million. Overall broadband lines are estimated at approximately 18.95 million units, showing a slight increase on a quarterly basis (+22 thousand lines), and essentially unchanged on an annual basis.
In 2023 in the Italian television sector the average daily audiences show, compared to 2022, a decline of 2.6% in the “entire day” (from 8.44 to 8.22 million viewers), and a similar trend (-2.5%) is recorded also for the prime time slot (from 19.48 to 18.99 million viewers)
The decline of daily publishing is confirmed. Last year, on average, 1.41 million copies were sold daily, down on an annual basis by 8.8% and 32.8% compared to 2019. Newspapers sold in digital format continue to fail to meet the favor of the market, underlines the Observatory: they have not recorded particularly significant changes on an annual basis (with an average of around 210 thousand copies per day) and are not particularly growing (+13.3%) compared to the corresponding value (180 thousand units daily) of 2019. The sale of digital copies is more concentrated than paper copies: in 2023 the top five newspapers in the digital segment (Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, Il Sole 24Ore, Il Fatto Daily and La Stampa)in fact, represent 60.4% of the total copies sold. The corresponding value for the paper version (in this case the top five newspapers are Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Gazzette dello Sport, La Stampa and Avvenire) is instead equal to 33.6%.
In 2023, with reference to the trend of unique users of the platforms that they offer video on demand services exclusively for a fee, on average Netflix records around 8.7 million unique users in decline (-1.6%) compared to 2022 and is followed by Amazon Prime Video with 6.7 million visitors (+3.1%).