The Dutch consumer telephony market grew by 0.1 percent during the first quarter of 2007 to 6.017 million connections, as a continued drop in PSTN/ISDN lines was offset by a strong VoIP market. According to Telecompaper's Dutch Fixed Telephony Q1 2007 report, the number of PSTN/ISDN connections fell 7.1 percent in the first quarter to 3.9 million, while Dutch consumer VoIP subscriptions grew by more than 17 percent to 2.1 million.
The DSL VoIP customer base passed the 1 million mark during the first quarter, growing more than 20 percent. The number of cable VoIP customers increased by 13.8 percent to almost 1 million (993,000) users on 31 March 2007. The DSL ISPs still have the highest VoIP penetration among their customer bases: 43.3 percent, compared with 22 percent in Q1 2006. KPN is the largest VoIP provider, with a market share of more than 30 percent on the Dutch digital telephony market, followed by chello (19.3%) and Casema (11.9%).
Telecompaper expects that the quarterly growth for the second quarter will be around 10 percent, or 200,000 net additions, driven by the cable network operators. However given KPN's decision to limit its number of new VoIP customers to 5,000 a week, Telecompaper has lowered its full-year market forecast from 3 million VoIP customers at the end of 2007 to around 2.8 million.
