Vodafone UK Enters Our Top 10 with 85000 Fixed Broadband Subscribers

Telecoms operator Vodafone UK has quietly slipped into our Top 10 UK ISPs By Subscriber Size table after last year’s £1.044bn deal to buy telecoms giant Cable & Wireless Worldwide (CWW) revealed that the group had 85,000 fixed line broadband customers (Q2-2013), which is down by -2k from 87,000 in Q1.

The deal to buy CWW was approved in June 2012 (here) but full integration of the business into Vodafone UK was only achieved on 1st April 2013. Cable & Wireless owns one of the UK’s largest networks of fibre optic business lines (20,000km+) and also supplies multiple ISPs with leased line and ADSL2+ broadband (LLU) connectivity (e.g. Tesco).

Regular readers will know that Vodafone UK gave up on its own VodafoneAt Home broadband service in 2011 (here) and has shown no sign of returning, although today’s removal of O2 from our table (they’ll been merged into Sky Broadband’s next results from Q2 2013 onwards) has allowed a space to open up for Vodafone to fill.

It’s good to finally have some figures for CWW as in the past the group has always ignored our requests for information. This data is useful because a lot of smaller unbundled broadband ISPs do make use of their platform and we haven’t previously had much visibility of movement for this side of the market.

Elsewhere Vodafone UK said that it was continuing to “invest significantly in its 4G network, which we expect to launch later this summer“.