France: the price of mobile services have melted by 11% last year - ZDNet

figures: This was mainly due to the arrival of Free Mobile on the market and the alignment of its competitors. But they are large consumers who benefited most.

The year 2012 was one of the upheaval of the French landscape of mobile with the arrival of Free.

We already knew that this had caused the big splash down more than 14% of the average monthly bill for French.

Unsurprisingly, ARCEP said today in its latest Market Observatory that mobile prices fell overall by 11.4% last year.

The decline even reached 28.4% for single service offerings without a terminal, the famous SIM-only, which now represents 36% of the packages in circulation, Free Mobile in mind, but also B & You, Sosh or Red.

Customers with postpaid contracts (packages, including blocked) benefit from lower prices by 12.6% in 2012. However, the extent of this decline varies profiles.

Data: 67% in one year

price decline is much stronger that consumers intensive use voice services: -15.5% for large consumers, 13.4% for average consumers and -9.0% for small consumers.

“The democratization of abundance offers for voice services has greatly benefited large consumers while the appearance of packages dedicated to small consumers has led to the recovery of lower prices (-8.2%) for this segment customer, who had been a price increase in 2011 (+1.4%), “says ARCEP.

The decline also affects users (less numerous) prepaid card with a price decline of 8%. “This price reduction is explained by the appearance of cards including abundance components for voice and SMS 2012, the price decline is also linked to the development of valid cards, allowing smaller consumers to smooth consumption and reduce their spending, “says the Authority.

Again, this trend is accompanied by a surge in applications. Voice side, the traffic volume reached 231.2 billion minutes in 2012 (13.3 billion minutes compared to 2011). The volume of data consumed at the start of mobile networks is 95,500 terabytes, an increase of 67.1% compared to 2011.

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Key figures: the average bill of mobile users in France