The Dutch broadband market continued to grow during the third quarter of 2015, leading to a household penetration of 92.5 percent at the end of September, according to the Dutch Broadband 2015 Q3 report from Telecompaper.
Compared with the end of September 2014, the penetration increased by 2.4%. The broadband market ended Q3 2015 with a total 7.093 million mass market connections, growing by 1.0% during the quarter. The growth came as usual from fibre and was supported by growing broadband via cable connections, following a rare quarterly loss for cable broadband in the second quarter.
Fibre broadband grew 5.8% during the quarter to end September 2015 with almost 13% of the total market. Cable broadband grew almost 1 percent during the quarter to end at 3.28 million connections, staying the largest broadband technology in the Netherlands. The growth of both technologies was enough to off-set the continued decrease in DSL broadband by 0.4 percent during the quarter to 2.9 million lines. This means that DSL’s share of the total broadband market in the Netherlands drops below 41 percent.
Ziggo, the largest cable operator in the Netherlands, returned to growth during the third quarter, adding 29,000 customers, but KPN (including Telfort, XS4ALL and the Edutel brands) still had more net additions with 31,000. At the end of the quarter, Ziggo remained the largest broadband provider with 43.6 percent share, while KPN gained 0.1 percentage points to reach 40.5 percent of the broadband market, returning to the same level as at the end of 2013.
Despite the increasingly saturated market, the broadband market is expected to grow by 2.6 percent in 2015, while slowing to around 2 percent growth in 2016. Cable and fibre are expected to continue to grow, offsetting the steady decrease in DSL users. For the period 2015-2019, Telecompaper expects a CAGR of 1.9 percent per year in the number of broadband connections.