Over four in five Portuguese households now use fixed high-speed internet services.
According to the regulator ANACOM, the number reached 3.5 million at the end of the third quarter. This was 6.8% more than in the same period last year and equivalent to 83.5% of all residential homes in the country. ANACOM notes that around nine in 10 new high-speed network customers contracted a serviced supported by FTTH.
The highest penetration of fixed high-speed internet was in Lisbon (96.6%), followed by Azores (91.1%) and Algarve (86.6%).
The regulator also says that at the end of the first half of this year 51% of high-speed accesses had download speeds of between 100-1400 Mbps (-11pp less than a year earlier), 31% speeds of between 400 Mbps and 1 Gbps (+12.7pp) and 5% of 1 Gbps or higher (+2.8%).
In July 2021, Portugal was the fourth EU27 country with the highest proportion of accesses with speeds equal to or greater than 100 Mbps (83.3%).
It is estimated that in Q3 this year at least 6 million households were cabled with a high-speed network, 2.6% more than in the same quarter of the previous year. The growth seen was lower than that recorded a year ago (4.5% year-on-year). The coverage of high-speed networks was 93.2%, 1.9pp more than in the third quarter of 2021.
Meanwhile, the number of households cabled with FTTH rose to around 5.9 million, 3.1% more than in the same period last year (it had grown by 7.5% in Q3 2021) , having reached a coverage of 91.1%.
The number of cabled households with high-speed access supported on cable TV networks (HFC) increased by 0.5% compared to the Q3 2021, totaling 3.7 million. The coverage of this type of network was 57.5%.
