Portugal’s so-called alternative broadband internet providers – Cabovisão, Novis, Oni and others – captured a total of 96,500 new clients in 2007, according to market regulator Anacom.
As a result, they have managed to reduce the gap that separates them from market leaders PT Comunicações (owner of Sapo) and ZON Multimédia (Netcabo), which added respectively 41,000 and 30,200 broadband clients between January and December of 2007.
In global terms, the market share of alternative operators grew from 29.2% at the end of 2006 to 31.5% at the end of last year, mostly due to the growth of small operators, whose share grew from 3.5% to 6.6%. Meanwhile, Sapo’s share fell 3 percentage points while ZON lost a percentage point in the same period.