Virgin Media UK Grows to Reach 4.51m Broadband ISP Subscribers

Quad-play provider Virgin Media (Liberty Global) has today revealed its latest Q4-2013 (calendar) results, which showed that their total broadband ISP subscriber base added +21,900 new customers during the quarter to total 4,510,500 (up from +13.6k added in Q3 2013). Oddly though, their UK cable network coverage figure fell slightly.

As usual nearly all of Virgin’s broadband subscribers came from their cable (DOCSIS / EuroDOCSIS) platform, which accounted for 4,375,700 customers. Meanwhile those on their now effectively defunct Virgin National (Virgin.net / ADSL) platform declined to 134,800 (down -17.2k in Q4 2013 vs -16.6k lost in Q3).

Elsewhere we noticed that Virgin Media’s cable network now passes 12,520,100 homes across the United Kingdom, which is actually down by -11,400 premises from the previous quarter when the figure stood at 12,531,500. The operator said that its, “homes passed counts are based on census data that can change based on either revisions to the data or from new census results.”

Virgin’s Cable Broadband Network

Of all of our 4.4 million internet customers, 3.2 million, or 74%, subscribe to superfast broadband services of 30Mbps or faster, an increase of 1.0 million in twelve months, including a 209,300 increase in Q4. We continue to see that nearly half of our new internet customers subscribe to speeds of 60 Mbps or higher, showing the strong, ongoing demand for faster speeds. We will again demonstrate the power of our network during 2014 with another significant speed increase beginning in February, when our top tier increases to 152 Mbps, twice the speed of VDSL products offered by competitors.

As reported last year, and then again by us earlier this month (here), Virgin Media have once again started boosting their headline cable broadband download speeds up to a maximum of 152Mbps. However it’s expected to take another year for the phased upgrade programme to complete and in the meantime their existing packages will continue to be offered.

On the financial front Virgin’s Average Monthly Revenue Per Customer Relationship has climbed to £48.21 from £47.05 one year ago and their quarterly revenue from Internet services stood at £221.1m (up from £205.2m in Q4 2012).