Is fixed telephony living its last years? This is essentially what the latest edition of the Electronic Communications Observatory, published by Arcep on May 24, seems to indicate. The “telecom police” draws up a new assessment of your phone’s use of French, particularly when it comes to making good old-fashioned calls. And despite a rebound in 2020, when the Covid-19 epidemic caused multiple lockdowns, the downward trend is confirmed.
The mobile call resists
In 2022, on average, the French spend 1h15 on the phone from their landline, either a line powered by an Internet box (“VLB”, now 90% of consumption), or by the old copper network (” PSTN” ).
A sharp drop, even for a limited period: this average reached 2h06 in 2018 and 1h57 in 2020. On a longer scale, the French phoned from their landline an average of 3h06 per month in 2015, 4h15 in 2012, before arrival of the mobile.
Faced with this decline, voice consumption from mobile phones is holding up well, with an average of 3h35 per month in 2022. A drop of 16 minutes in one year, after jumping to 4h02 in 2020.
This data does not take into account voice calls made from instant messaging applications such as WhatsApp or FaceTime. Tools that largely compete with SMS, which is also losing ground.
In 2002, the French sent an average of 12 SMS per month, rising to 245 in 2013, during the boom in this technology. Before, it suffered a sharp drop from 2016, with the popularization of instant messaging: an average of 200 SMS messages were sent each month in 2018, compared to only 118 in 2022. Back to the level… of 2009.
Source: BFM TV
