Electronic communications and postal service markets continue to grow in 2017
The total income in 2017 was 191.2 billion dinars, which is by approximately 1% more than previous year. In 2017, revenues from electronic communications account for 4.3% of the Serbian GDP. Like in previous years, the largest share in the total revenues was realized from mobile telephony service provision, accounting for 58.5% of the total income.
Overall investment in the electronic communications sector has grown as well. In 2017, investments accounted for 32.8 billion dinars, which is by 1.6% more than previous year. The biggest investments were made in mobile telephony (13.5 billion dinars) and fixed network (8 billion dinars), making up 65.58% of the total investment during 2017.
Despite a slight decrease, the number of mobile network users is still superior to the number of inhabitants. There are 122 mobile telephony users per 100 inhabitants now, against 128 in 2016. On average, each mobile telephony user spends 4 minutes and 58 seconds on their phone and sends 2.2 SMS. Unlike mobile telephony, fixed telephony users have dropped in number and set on one subscriber per household.
The growth trend of fixed broadband Internet access users has continued and is currently by 2% higher compared to 2016, with 60 Internet subscribers per 100 households. Internet was mostly used for online newspaper and magazine reading, information search on goods and services and for participation in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The ever growing use of mobile phones for broadband Internet access has resulted in an increase in number of mobile Internet users. The traffic volume has doubled compared to the previous year, reaching around 97 million GB in 2017 on an annual level.
The number of users of media content distribution grew by 2.4% compared to the previous year, mostly due to an increase in the number of cable distribution system (CDS) subscribers. There were 68 media content distribution users per 100 households in 2017.
In 2017, the number of users’ complaints regarding the quality of electronic communications services dropped on average by 6% for all types of services. The majority of complaints concerned the quality of broadband Internet access. For that reason, RATEL enabled broadband Internet access QoS measuring by means of NetTest application, making possible for users to analyze and compare each operator’s QoS, depending on the location or type of Internet access.