The Internet in Portugal achieved a penetration rate of about 64% of the population in 2012. With an average peak Internet access speed of 34.5 megabits per second,

Portugal Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...

stood seventeenth on the list of countries with the fastest Internet access.

Status

* Internet users: 6.9 million users, 48th in the world; 64.0% of the population, 57th in the world (2012)."Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000-2012"
International Telecommunication Union (Geneva), June 2013, retrieved 22 June 2013 * Fixed broadband: 2.4 million subscribers, 34th in the world; 22.3% of the population, 43rd in the world (2012)"Fixed (wired)-broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants 2012"
, Dynamic Report, ITU ITC EYE,

International Telecommunication Union The International Telecommunication Union is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for many matters related to information and communication technologies. It was established on 17 May 1865 as the International Telegraph Unio ...

. Retrieved on 29 June 2013. * Mobile broadband: 3.5 million subscribers, 47th in the world; 32.5% of the population, 52nd in the world (2012)"Active mobile-broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants 2012"
, Dynamic Report, ITU ITC EYE,

. Retrieved on 29 June 2013. * Internet hosts: 3.7 million hosts, 28th in the world (2012) * IPv4: 5,833,504 addresses allocated, 0.1% of the world total; 541 IPv4 addresses per 1000 persons (2012) * Domain name:

.pt .pt is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Portugal and is managed by Associação DNS.PT. It has the following second-level domains: * .com.pt: no restrictions; online registration * .edu.pt: education * .gov.pt: Governmen ...

ADSL2+ and FTTx

ADSL Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is a type of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem can provide. ...

service has been available in Portugal since 2000, however it was not until 2002 that the service started to see wide acceptance from the general public, mainly due to increased competition from service providers, which helped to level prices. Market penetration in Portugal is around 50% although Portugal has the distinction of being one of the few European countries to have coverage in virtually the entire territory. There are several service providers offering ADSL,

fiber Fiber or fibre (from la, fibra, links=no) is a natural or artificial substance that is significantly longer than it is wide. Fibers are often used in the manufacture of other materials. The strongest engineering materials often incorpora ...

and

wireless Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most ...

services in Portugal to the residential and the professional markets. The majority of the residential market is split between the two larger operators:

Portugal Telecom Altice Portugal (formerly known as Portugal Telecom or PT) is the largest telecommunications service provider in Portugal. Since June 2, 2015, the company has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Altice Europe, a multinational cable and telecommuni ...

and

Sonae Sonae is a multinational business group based in Maia, Porto District, Portugal. It is present in 90 countries, operating in several sectors, including retail, financial services, shopping centres management, software and information systems, ...

. The current maximum speed for home Internet plans in Portugal is 1 Gbit/s, available on special request, and 360 Mbit/s is widely available together with television and telephone services.

Portugal Telecom

A former monopoly,

is still the largest telecommunications company in the country. Due to its previous monopoly status its copper landline infrastructure covers all territory, making it the only operator that can offer direct service anywhere in the country. Portugal Telecom uses different brands to segment their

service, among others SAPO for the residential market and Telepac for the small business market. In November 2006 Portugal Telecom announced their

ADSL2+ G.992.5 (also referred to as ADSL2+, G.dmt.bis+, and G.adslplus) is an ITU-T standard for asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) broadband Internet access. The standard has a maximum theoretical downstream sync speed of 24 megabits per second ...

service, adding a 24 Mbit/s speed grade service to their market offer and effectively catching up to competitor

com that had been offering ADSL2+ speed grades for several months. Portugal Telecom was also the first to deploy fiber in the country, being that ZON, Vodafone and Sonae followed with their deployment after being denied access to Portugal Telecom's infrastructure.

Sonae

com started operations in 1999, soon after the government opened the telecommunications market to competition. The company started by renting Portugal Telecom's lines in order to offer their voice service to customers, but soon started laying their own infrastructure and can now offer direct service in the main metropolitan areas. Sonaecom also uses different brands to segment their ADSL offer, these include

Optimus Clix Optimus Clix was one of the triple play brands in Portugal of the telecommunication operator Optimus. Optimus Clix was a competitor of the dominant operator (Portugal Telecom) in the residential market as Internet, telephone and TV service prov ...

for the residential market and Novis enabling the company to offer

Triple Play In baseball, a triple play (denoted as TP in baseball statistics) is the act of making three outs during the same play. There have only been 733 triple plays in Major League Baseball (MLB) since 1876, an average of just over five per season. Th ...

services to customers in select areas. Taking advantage of the increased bandwidth provided by their ADSL2+ network, Sonaecom announced in June 2006 the launch of their

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded med ...

service, SmartTV.

Other ADSL and fiber providers

Vodafone Vodafone Group plc () is a British multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates services in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. , Vod ...

ZON Multimédia NOS, SGPS S.A. is a Portuguese telecommunications and media company who provides mobile and fixed telephony, cable television, satellite television and internet. The company resulted from the merger in 2013 of two of the country's major telecom ...

Cable

Cable service providers

* Cabovisão *

Internet censorship and surveillance

Internet access in Portugal is not restricted. There are neither government restrictions on access to the Internet nor reports that the government monitors

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

or Internet

chat room The term chat room, or chatroom (and sometimes group chat; abbreviated as GC), is primarily used to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing. The term can thus mean any technology, ranging from ...

s without appropriate legal authority. The constitution and law provide for freedom of speech and

press Press may refer to: Media * Print media or news media, commonly called "the press" * Printing press, commonly called "the press" * Press (newspaper), a list of newspapers * Press TV, an Iranian television network People * Press (surname), a fam ...

, and the government generally respects these rights in practice. An independent press, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combine to ensure freedom of speech and press. The law criminalizes the denigration of ethnic or religious minorities and the engagement in offensive practices such as

Holocaust denial Holocaust denial is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that falsely asserts that the Nazi genocide of Jews, known as the Holocaust, is a myth, fabrication, or exaggeration. Holocaust deniers make one or more of the following false statements: ...

. Prison sentences for these crimes run between six months to eight years. The constitution and law prohibit arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence, and the government generally respected these prohibitions in practice,"Portugal"
''Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2012'', Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, U.S. Department of State. Retrieved 13 November 2013. except in more recent years (see below). The website Tugaleaks, which since December 2010 aims to serve as Portugal's version of

WikiLeaks WikiLeaks () is an international non-profit organisation that published news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder and director and ...

, had its bank account for donations arbitrarily closed on 13 July 2012 with no official communication. Tugaleaks contributors were finally told the account had been closed for its involvement in money laundering and

terrorist Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of criminal violence to provoke a state of terror or fear, mostly with the intention to achieve political or religious aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violen ...

financing. As of March 2015, Portuguese ISPs have been ordered to block

The Pirate Bay The Pirate Bay (sometimes abbreviated as TPB) is an online index of digital content of entertainment media and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay allows visitors to search, download, and contribute ma ...

and many of its proxies by a court order, following the European trend, after a lawsuit brought by the Association for Copyright Management, Producers and Publishers ( GEDIPE). This is the first time ever a website is blocked by ISPs in

. In July 2015 the Ministry of Culture announced the signed a memorandum between its own General Inspection of Cultural Activities (IGAC), the Portuguese Association of Telecommunication Operators (APRITEL), various rightsholder groups, the body responsible for administering Portugal’s .PT domain and representatives from the advertising industry to block any website they deemed appropriate. These measures have resulted on thousands of websites blocked under the charges of copyright infringement and gambling. One notable example of blocked copyrighted materials are internet databases that publish copyrighted scientific literature, such as LibGen. Such databases are often the only practical source of academic publications for scientists, the public and universities who can't afford subscription/licensing fees for scientific journals.

References

External links

DNS.PT Association
official website, operator of the .pt domain
ZON Optimus

Portugal Telecom

Sonae

Vodafone

Portugal Internet
Internet service for travelers that are planning a short stay in Portugal {{Internet censorship by country