empirica is happy to announce the launch of the European Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) for 2020 by DG CNECT on June 11th. DESI is a composite index that summarises relevant indicators on Europe’s digital performance and tracks the evolution of EU Member States in digital competitiveness. Included indicators cover the areas of Connectivity, Human Capital, Use of Internet, Integration of Digital Technologies and Digital Public Services. empirica plays a key role in informing the DESI Broadband Connectivity indicator through its monitoring studies of retail broadband prices conducted on behalf of the European Commission. For the fifth year in a row, empirica contributes to the index with comprehensive data on retail prices of fixed and mobile broadband offers for consumers in the EU-28, Iceland, Norway, Japan, South Korea and the USA. Overall, mobile and fixed broadband prices tend to further decrease and the availability of high-speed broadband offers increases and is expected to do so in the future.

For the first time, both fixed and mobile broadband offer data has been collected during the same monitoring period of October 2019 as part of the new study on “Retail Broadband Prices in Europe, 2019-2021”. The study monitored offers from the largest Mobile Network Operators and Internet Service Providers in each country to ensure that the lowest price products are widely available and purchased. empirica advanced the methodology by implementing the household approach fully aligned to the 2018 BEREC Guidelines. A set of 17 representative household as well as “stand-alone” baskets with different usage patterns were considered. In particular, household baskets include convergent bundles, that is, bundles of usage including both fixed access products and mobile broadband services (data and voice) to represent the growing trend of fixed broadband lines bundled with mobile services, which in some cases have the most competitive prices. The new study period saw a number of methodological adaptions to reflect changing market conditions and to ensure a reliable and realistic representation of broadband market prices according to current and future consumption patterns. All results have been presented to and discussed with National Regulatory Authorities covered by the study.

The study team at empirica is now preparing for the forthcoming monitoring phase which will take place end of 2020 and is looking forward to inform the European Commission and National Regulatory Authorities on price developments within the Digital Single Market to support the vision of affordable and wide-spread high-speed broadband services.

Source: DESI 2020, European Commission