Television

According to the Informa report, some 71% of households in Poland will be using pay TV by the end of this year. The market will be split half and half between DTH and cable TV. According to Informa, the split is expected to remain stable over the next 4 years. The cable TV market has been growing over the last 5 years at an average 4% p.a., it is expected to grow by another 5% by 2013.

The Polish cable market is one of the fastest growing markets in Eastern Europe. Poland is also the third largest cable television market in the European Union in terms of the number of subscribers.

According to the Polish National Broadcasting Council, there were over 630 cable operators in Poland in 2006. According to the Polish Chamber for Electronic Communication, as of December 2008, the networks of the top four cable players (UPC, Multimedia Polska, Vectra and AsterCity) rendered services to over 2.8 million customers, that is over 60% of the entire cable market.

The potential of the domestic cable market lies primarily with prevalent presence of multi-dwelling households in Poland, dense population in small and large agglomerations, and an impressive number of hours devoted to television by an average customer.

Internet

As reported by the Polish Central Statistical Office (data available at http://www.stat.gov.pl/), as at the end of 2008 "the number of households with Internet access at home exceeded 6 million  (48% of total households), of which 4.8 million households (46% of total households) actually accessed the Internet while the remaining household members were aware of the fact that they may access the Internet (primarily using mobile phone access) but did not make use of it. The number of households using broadband connections is growing rapidly - in 2008 there were 4.8 million such households (38% of total households). The number grew by nearly a million from 2006 (16 % pts) and is growing faster than the number of households with Internet access (growth of 12 % pts), which means that practically all new Internet connections are broadband and this type of Internet access is displacing narrowband."

However, the proportion of Internet users to total population and the number of broadband Internet lines per 100 inhabitants is still among the lowest in Europe.

According to the European Commission report on electronic communication dated 19 March 2008, Poland was ranked penultimate among EU member states as far as the number of broadband connections per 100 residents is concerned (see chart below).

Sources:

Telephony

As announced by the Polish Central Statistical Office on http://www.stat.gov.pl/ in 2007 fixed telephony services were rendered by 96 operators who provided services consisting in local, national and international calls.

According to CSO, as of the end of 2007 the number of landlines amounted to ca. 10.2 million and was 9.2% lower than the year before. The number of landlines in urban areas amounted to 8.2 million (10.2% decline) and in rural areas – 2.1 million (5.2% decline). There were 26.9 lines per 100 population (35.1 in urban areas and 13.9 in rural areas).

According to CSO, the total duration of landline calls in 2007 was 21.5 bn minutes, of which 20 bn was made by business subscribers and 1.5 bn by residential subscribers.