The competitions and markets watchdog (CNMC) has published the 2023 Telecommunications and Audiovisual Sector Economic Report.
Total revenues in the sector recorded in 2023 were very similar to those of the previous year. While retail revenues increased by 0.5%, wholesale revenues decreased by 2.3% compared to the previous year.
Total investment in the telecommunications and audiovisual sector reached almost €6 billion. Excluding spectrum acquisitions, investment in 2023 was 3.7% higher than in the previous year. As in previous years, the main driver of investment continued to be the deployment, by the main operators, of next-generation access networks and mobile networks.
Within retail revenues, the combined market share between Movistar, Orange, Vodafone and Grupo MasMovil reached 78%.
2023 marked a new advance in the deployment of next-generation access networks (NGA): 87.2 million accesses installed (79.2 million fibre and 8 million cable), an increase of almost five million FTTH accesses compared to the previous year.
Looking at active lines, almost 86% of broadband accesses were fibre optic (+7.6% compared to 2022).
Connection speed also improved compared to the previous year. The percentage of lines with a speed of 100 Mbps or higher reached 94.3% (16.8 million lines). Accesses with a speed of 500 Mbps or higher totalled 9.8 million (54.8% of the total) and accesses with a speed of 1 Gbps or higher reached 4.4 million (24.9% of the total).
DIGI was once again the operator with the greatest increase in fixed broadband lines with 539 thousand new lines and closed the year with 1.37 million.
5G Coverage
In 2023, four mobile operators launched 5G Internet services and, by December, 85.4% of the population already had 5G coverage. Meanwhile, 4G technology reached 99.7% of the population.
Data traffic over mobile networks increased by 27.6% in 2023 compared to the previous year, reaching 7.9 million terabytes. Average monthly traffic per line increased by 24.6%. 4G networks accounted for 87.8% of total traffic recorded.
Audiovisual services
Subscriptions to paid audiovisual content increased by 3.8% to almost 30 million subscribers. This means that 22.8 million users were subscribed to paid streaming or online audiovisual services (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO and Disney+, etc.) and 6.9 million were subscribed to paid content platforms of traditional telecommunications operators.
Advertising revenues amounted to 1.95 billion euro, 1.4 million more than the figure recorded in the previous year.
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