Namely, outgoing traffic is six percent higher than in the first three months of last year. There are currently 4.36 million mobile phone users in Croatia and most of them have a subscription, so although the population census has not yet been conducted, we can conclude that there are more active mobile subscriptions in Croatia than residents. It’s interesting that the number of mobile service users decreased by about 300,000 compared to the third quarter of 2019. However, the market shares of the operators varied slightly. HT holds a convincing leadership position with a 45.8 percent share, followed by A1 with 34.8 percent, and Telemach with 19.4 percent. There is also a high number of transferred numbers, but this did not significantly affect the ratio of competitors in the market.

Calls are still popular but cannot compete with the growth of mobile internet consumption, which is growing at a rate of 26.5 percent. The total data traffic in the first quarter thus reached 627 PB, leading to the conclusion that internet became the most important option when choosing a service and tariff.

On the other hand, the total outgoing traffic generated by calls from landlines continues to fall, recording a 7 percent worse result in just a year. Although the HAKOM report does not provide data on text messages from global data, it is evident that they are falling at a rate of more than 10 percent annually.

In roaming, the trend of declining call duration continues, both of Croatian users in international networks and foreigners in Croatian national networks, as a result of the pandemic. According to HAKOM, phone calls made by Croatian users in international mobile networks saw a decrease of 14.2%. In comparison, phone calls made by foreign users in Croatian mobile networks saw a drop of 7.9%.

Total revenue in the electronic communications market increased by 3.3% from the first quarter of 2020, with revenues increasing by 9.2% in the broadband Internet access market, by 3.5% in the television services market, and by 7.7% in the network and line rental services market. Revenues in mobile and fixed telephone services decreased slightly, all due to fewer roaming calls.

Despite a slight decline in total investments since the beginning of the year, investment in fiber access infrastructure saw a sharp rise of 140 percent year-over-year. Continued investment in broadband access infrastructure is important for maintaining the growth trend in the number of high-speed broadband connections.

In the fixed network, the highest growth is still recorded in the number of high-speed broadband connections. In the first quarter of 2021, 17 percent of users had access to the Internet at speeds higher than 100 Mbit/s, and the growth is generated by connections via fiber optic access infrastructure (12 percent). About 42 percent of users use speeds over 30 Mbit/s. The total number of service package users is growing, mostly those with 4D packages as they migrate from 3D to get bigger discounts on all services by fixed-mobile bundling.