Number of mobile phone subscribers in Turkey reach 83.5 million: Report

ISTANBUL

The number of mobile phone subscribers in Turkey increased to 83.5 million as of the first quarter of 2021, rising from 82.1 million at the end of 2020, data from the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) have shown.

The mobile subscriber penetration rate also climbed from 99 percent in 2020 to almost 100 percent as of the end of March.

Noting that one of the sectors with the highest growth in the COVID-19 era was electronic communication, the report shed light on the fact that the demand of consumers for many types of services, especially broadband internet, increased in the same period.

Operators also made an effort to provide better quality service to their customers without interrupting their investments, the report said, drawing attention to the fact that although operator revenues increased by more than 15 percent last year, investments reached almost double this rate.

In the first quarter of 2021, operator revenues increased by more than 19 percent compared to the same period of the previous year.

Investments also increased by 13 percent in the same period.

Standing out due to their critical importance in terms of digitalization and the spread of new-generation services, the fiber infrastructure investments grew by nearly 10 percent compared to the same period of the previous year.

As of the end of March, there were more than 77 million 4.5G subscribers in the country, but the number of active users was around 53.8 million as some mobile phones types or SIM cards are not compatible with 4.5G, which was introduced to the local market in April 2016.

The number of machine-to-machine communication (M2M) subscribers also increased, reaching 6.5 million as of the first quarter of this year.

The rate of postpaid subscribers rose to 66.3 percent in the first quarter of this year as the subscriber profile continues to increase every quarter.

As of the end of March, the number of mobile numbers transferred exceeded 150 million in total, once again showing the prevalence reached by the practice.

The fact that many daily activities were carried out online during the pandemic period increased both the number of mobile and fixed internet subscribers and the amount of usage.

The number of broadband users reached 83.9 million (17.1 million fixed-line subscribers and 66.8 million mobile subscribers) as of March 2021, rising 8 percent on an annual basis.

In terms of technologies, the biggest increase was seen in the “Fiber to the Home” subscription with 36 percent annually.

The average monthly data usage of fixed internet subscribers was 197 GB per subscriber in the first quarter of 2021.

An average of 9.8 gigabytes of the internet was used monthly through mobile phones, while 11.1 gigabytes of the internet was used through 4.5G mobile phones alone.