Mobile accounted for 3 pct of total internet traffic in Romania in H1 2016

Romania hosted 19 million fixed and mobile broadband internet connections through which users have generated 2.7 million terabytes (TB) worth of traffic in the first six months of last year, according to Eduard Lovin, executive director for regulation at the National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications of Romania (ANCOM).

“Although more people use mobile phones and tablets on the internet, the traffic on this equipments represents just 3 percent of total. Going forward, Romania is set to follow the forecasted trend at European level, for the mobile data traffic to grow exponentially (eight fold by 2020), and this to be driven primarily by smartphones and tablets, and less by laptops,” said Lovin during the WeLoveDigital 2017 event.

The mobile broadband connections that supported traffic rose by 15 percent to 14.8 million, while the fixed connections gained 5 percent to 4.3 million units in the first half of 2016 versus the same period of 2015.

According to ANCOM. Romania 3.7 million 4G services connections in the first semester of last year, from 1.4 million in the same period of 2015. Around one quarter of the total mobile broadband connections were 4G.

The average internet consumption per user stood at 101 gigabytes (GB) on fixed connections in H1 2016, while the average traffic through mobile connections doubled to 0.63 GB in the same period.