UPDATE Ofcom Reveals UK Broadband Connections Rise to 21.7 Million

The communications regulator, Ofcom, has today published its latest Telecoms Market Data Tables Q4 2012 update and confirmed that the United Kingdom is now home to 22,174,000 21,680,000 fixed line broadband ISP connections (excluding corporate lines), which is up sharply by +659,000 +356,00 in the quarter.

It’s particularly interesting to note that the newer connections were largely composed of superfast broadband services (e.g. FTTC, FTTP from BTInfinity etc.) and unbundled LLU ADSL products (e.g. Sky Broadband and TalkTalk).

Sadly Non-LLU ADSL services, such as those delivered via BTWholesale based broadband ISPs like Zen Internet, Entanet and IDNet, had a good quarter suffered another sharp decline. Overall the UK ended Q4 by being home to 1.1 million (5.4%) more broadband connections in 2012 than there had been a year previously.

Elsewhere there were 33,145,000 fixed phone lines at the end of Q4 2012, which is 107,000 (0.3%) less than a year earlier, although a growth in phone lines from Virgin Media and other operators (e.g. Sky Broadband, TalkTalk) delivered a rare quarterly increase of +135,000 (0.4%) between Q3 and Q4 2012 (the first growth seen in this sector since Q1-2012). In related news UK fixed telephony services generated £2.1bn in retail revenues in Q4 2012, which is £93m (4.2%) less than in Q4 2011.

Sadly the total number of active Mobile Broadband subscribers decreased slightly to 4.917 million in Q4 2012 (down by 1.8% in the quarter). It should be noted that this refers to datacard and USB Modem (Dongle) based connections (i.e. it excludes Smartphone based internet subscriptions). Meanwhile the number of active mobile subscribers increased 0.7% to 82.675 million and retail revenues generated by mobile telephony increased by 0.8% in 2012 to £15.2bn.

Telecoms Market Data Tables Q4 2012 (PDF)
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/telecoms/Q4-2012.pdf

UPDATE 9th May 2013:

It looks like Ofcom got their fixed line broadband figures wrong and have issued a new table to correct for their error. The primary difference appears to be fewer fibre subscribers than first reported and a decline (instead of a rise) in non-LLU based ADSL broadband services.