Turks surpass Europeans in time spent talking on mobile phone

Similar to previous periods, Turkey leads mobile phone usage with monthly 436 minute conversation in the third quarter of 2016.

According to data provided by the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK), there are a total of 74.5 million mobile subscribers in Turkey within the given period, which corresponds to about 95 percent mobile penetration.

The number of 3G subscribers, which had reached about 66 million by the end of March, went down to 23.5 million with the arrival of 4.5G. The number of 4.5G users, on the other side, has reached up to 45.7 million.

Based on the data, the fixed and mobile phone traffic exceeded 64 billion minutes in the third quarter, 62.1 billion minutes of the given duration were done on mobile phone and 2.1 billion minutes were from fixed telephones. The amount of mobile traffic increased by 2.6 percent compared to the previous quarter and the rate of fixed phone traffic decreased by 16 percent during the same period.

Compared to monthly minutes of use (MoU) of some European countries, Turkey has made the largest number of mobile calls. Turkey's MoU, which stood at 404 minutes in the third quarter of 2015, rose to 436 minutes in the third quarter of this year increasing by 8 percent. Turkey has overtaken its closest followers France, Sweden and Norway and tripled Germany, which made 156 minutes of monthly conversations per subscriber.