The number of cell phone subscribers surpassed the number of citizens in the Netherlands in the first quarter this year, a survey showed on Tuesday.
Mobile phone operators in the Netherlands added 356,000 net connections, lifting the total to 16.4 million customers at the end of March, or 100.4 percent of the population, Dutch research group Telecompaper said.
The survey counted the number of subscribers, measured by SIM cards that are put inside a mobile phone to connect it to a network, and did not measure how many individuals owned a handset.
"A lot of people have two or even more SIM cards," said analyst Ed Achterberg.
Some people own several mobile phones to separate private and business calls. In addition, aggressive price plans due to ferocious competition have young people hunting for better deals.
SIM cards have recently been handed out as part of package deals with broadband Internet subscriptions, regardless of whether people wanted them or not.
And the cards are often used by machines as well as people.
In Denmark, with a population of 5.5 million, 150,000 SIM cards are used in machines such as alarm systems and wind turbines that use the cellphone network to report problems.
The real penetration of individuals owning cellphones in the Netherlands is estimated to be around 75 or 80 percent.
Other European countries with mobile subscriptions around 100 percent are Israel (105 percent), Sweden (104), Finland (98 percent), Denmark (95) and Estonia (95), but not all operators make the same distinction between active and non-active subscribers.
In Britain, operators only count those subscribers that have used their phone in the last three months, which has cut SIM card penetration but boosted average revenue per user.
"It's a bit of a scam. Phones with pre-paid contracts are heavily subsidized. A lot of SIM cards in them are never activated," said telecoms consultant John Strand in Copenhagen.
The subsidies on mobile phones, which carriers can only earn back through call charges, are on the way out, as competition from very low cost operators increases, Telecompaper said.
"Operators seem less committed to subsidize the acquisition of prepay customers," Achterberg said, adding this has already slowed down customer acquisition growth in the first quarter.
