Europe's major markets still saw subscriber growth in 2009, despite the economic downturn, reports a new survey by Tariff Consultancy Ltd (TCL).
The research firm said that mobile operators in the eight European countries surveyed had over 417 million registered subscribers, equivalent to 123 per cent of the population--excluding the MVNO sector.
However, regardless of this increase, TCL claimed that blended ARPU levels across all of the eight countries declined by 2.8 per cent. But these declines tended to follow uniform trends in each country. For example, German operators had among the lowest ARPU rates and French operators had among the highest. However blended churn rates varied considerably from operator to operator in each country. Article