12 Jul 2011Portugal Broadband Overview

Portugal has a mid-sized but advanced telecoms market, with a steadily growing broadband subscriber base well served by cable, DSL and the emerging FTTx platforms. Mobile penetration is far above the European Union average, while the development of digital TV services has progressed under cautious regulatory guidance. The progressive liberalisation of the Portuguese market began at the beginning of the 1990s through the creation of the Portuguese Institute for Communications (ICP). Through a combination of specific deadlines for liberalisation and entry mechanisms for new market players, Portugal’s telecoms scene was successfully opened up to competition.

The country’s broadband market showed accelerated growth in 2010 not least due to its wide spread cable and DSL networks, but also due to aggressive fibre deployment. Broadband services with up to 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps and even 1 Gbps speeds were launched in 2009. The country’s leading telecom operators have partnered up to build high speed next generation networks.

The government’s broadband initiative for 2009-2010 had the following two aims: (i) the connection of up to 1.5 million homes and businesses to the new fibre networks enabling them to benefit from improvements in high-speed Internet, TV and voice services; (ii) the achievement of 50 per cent broadband penetration among households by 2010. Both aims were reached.

At the end of 2010, the number of households connected to the fibre-optic networks (FTTH/B) by all operators stood at 1.47 million. The number of households with accesses using the EuroDOCSIS 3.0 standard totalled 3.8 million. It is estimated that about 59 per cent of family households now have access to at least one high-speed network. High-speed accesses are concentrated in the Lisbon and North regions of the country.