There were almost 23 million active users of mobile telephony services in Romania at the end of 2013, up 0.3 percent against the previous year, out of which 9.4 million had subscriptions and 13.5 million were using the services through a prepaid card, according to the recent data from the National Authority for Managment and Regulation in Communications (ANCOM).

The mobile telephony penetration rate was 113.9 percent per 100 inhabitants at the end of 2013.

Voice traffic on mobile networks recorded an annual growth of 3.3 percent, to 63.6 billion minutes last year.

About 16.9 billion SMS messages were sent in 2013, a 22 percent increase year-on-year. On average, a Romanian sent 62 SMS messages per month, or about two messages a day, up 23 percent against 2012.

Moreover, the average duration of a phone call was of 2 minutes and 23 seconds last year.

At the end of 2013, there were 13.6 million connections to mobile internet, up 35 percent year-on-year. Of the total, 9.6 million were broadband connections, according to ANCOM.

Irina Popescu, irina.popescu@romania-insider.com