Orange UK Home Broadband ISP Subscribers See Tiny Growth to 714000

It finally happened. After years of waiting Orange UK (Everything Everywhere) has today reported its first tiny sliver of growth in their fixed line Home Broadband subscriber base, which increased from 713k in Q1-2012 to 714,000 in Q2 (up by +1,000). But what about future services and superfast packages?

The operator has been attempting to turn its decline around since 2007 when the same service had a much more substantial figure of 1,142,000. Since then it’s been all downhill but now, despite only showing a slim improvement in their latest results to 30th June 2012, Everything Everywhere is becoming more positive.

Orange has even begun to talk about their fixed broadband services continuing “to gain momentum, delivering 11% yoy revenue growth, driven by strong multiproduct adoption, with 97% of new fixed broadband customers taking line rental and mobile“.

History of Orange’s UK Home Broadband Decline
Q3-2007 1,142,000 (Highest Point)
Q3-2010 795,000 (-347,000)
Q4-2010 770,000 (-25,000)
Q1-2011 726,000 (-44,000)
Q2-2011 716,000 (-10,000)
Q3-2011 713,000 (-3,000)
Q4-2011 713,000 (0)
Q1-2012 713,000 (0)
Q2-2012 714,000 (+1,000)

We note that some of the operator’s fixed broadband financial boost will have undoubtedly come from cost savings that have occurred as a result of Orange’s migration of its fixed broadband customers from their old legacy network and on to BT’s platform. This apparently lowered their operating costs.

Olaf Swantee, CEO of Everything Everywhere, said:

“In the first half, we delivered a solid commercial performance, with good underlying revenue growth. We are making strong progress integrating the legacy Orange and T-Mobile businesses to create cost efficiencies and deliver planned synergy targets, while investing in significant network upgrades to further improve our customer experience.”

Despite the good news it’s important to remember that today’s results are still -0.3% down on the 716k recorded during Q2 last year. Meanwhile EE appears focused upon investment in its Mobile Broadband platform. Indeed its Orange UK division, much like O2 (BE Broadband), still has no viable superfast fixed line broadband packages and that will need to be corrected if it is to stay competitive.