Q3 data points - Switzerland

Another spectacularly dull conference call from Swisscom revealed that the company is expecting rival Cablecom to have 80,000 VoIP subs by year-end, which would equate to just over 2% of the access market. Swisscom's voice line loss went up fairly sharply sequentially in the quarter (-0.7%, or 29k lines), but the company rightly stresses that there are some deconsolidation effects (Telecom Liechtenstein) and mobile substitution effects which complicate interpretation of the VoIP impact. Q3 mobile voice traffic was up only 1.75% YoY, while national fixed line traffic was down 7.9% YoY. In raw minute terms, national fixed traffic lost 145m minutes, and mobile gained only 15m, despite Swisscom's stable 64% market share in mobile. Some traffic is going to carrier pre-select (my guess is half of the decline), some to mobile (based on Swisscom's market share I think this is around 16% overall), and I think the rest is VoIP, IM, etc. Maybe we'll get some further insights when Cablecom next reports.