In the first nine months of 2020, total revenue in the electronic communications market in Croatia decreased by 4.9 percent compared to the end of September last year. More about roaming traffic in Croatia is below.

The decrease in total revenues was mostly due to the decrease in revenues from fixed and mobile telephone services, which together amounted to 13.5 percent, while revenue growth in the broadband Internet market of 2 percent and growth in the pay-TV market was insufficient to compensate for lower revenues from telephone services provided.

In the third quarter of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic continued to have a strong impact on the electronic communications market. Given the situation, data traffic, as well as the number of minutes of talk time in the mobile phone network, is expected to grow compared to the same period in 2019. In the third quarter, data traffic reached a total of 567 petabytes (PB). Compared to the first nine months of 2019, this is an increase of 36 percent.

Compared to the end of September last year, the total number of outgoing minutes in the mobile network also increased by 12 percent, but revenues from mobile phone service were still reduced by 12 percent, mostly due to lower roaming traffic. The third quarter shows the impact of the pandemic on international travel and tourism in Croatia, as Croatian users ‘roaming minutes fell by 11 percent, as well as the duration of foreigners’ roaming calls on Croatian mobile networks, by 29 percent compared to the first three quarters of 2019.

Total investments in tangible and intangible assets in fixed networks decreased slightly by 0.2 percent, although investments in fiber optic access infrastructure increased by 12.9 percent and investments in the construction of electronic communications infrastructure by 70.8 percent. Therefore, the trend of investing in broadband access infrastructure can be expected to continue in the coming period, which is important to maintain the growth in the number of very high-speed broadband connections. In the mobile network, investments in network equipment grew by 0.3 percent compared to the first nine months of 2019.

Looking at broadband connections in the fixed network, the number of connections via fiber optic access technology is growing the most; about 10 percent of users have broadband Internet access via FTTH / FTTB connections. In terms of speeds, about 40 percent of fixed network users have contracted Internet access at speeds greater than 30 Mbit / s, and over 12 percent with speeds greater than 100 Mbit / s. The total number of service package users is growing in all package categories: 2D, 3D and mostly 4D packages. Slightly more than 56 percent of households use pay-TV services.