Fingers in the dike

The Dutch market never fails to shock and awe. Daily paper Trouw today has a blockbuster on cable VoIP in the Netherlands. Multikabel in the north has 50k subs, which is more than 15% market share within its comparatively small footprint. UPC is over 10% in its footprint, and Essent has taken 2.5% of the market in-region without promotion. Altogether it looks like the top four players have over 450k households on VoIP, which looks to be about 6% of total households in the Netherlands. What if they were to make on-net calls between their various customers free (i.e., voice peering)?

To put all this in perspective, KPN said back at Q3 that it estimated mobile-only households at 15% of the total, and growing by one percentage point or so each quarter. Let's assume that we're around the 16 - 17% mark currently. On top of this we now have 6% of households with cable VoIP, but no PSTN line. I assume there is a fair amount of overlap between cable VoIP and mobile-only households (and this will probably intensify as UPC pushes its MVNO), but I feel it would be safe to assume that around 20% of Dutch households currently have no PSTN service.