Vodafone UK Stems Fixed Broadband Decline as 4G Users Hit 637K

The latest Q1-2013 (calendar) financial results for Vodafone UK have revealed that their fixed line broadband subscriber base appears to have stabilised at 59,000 customers (unchanged from the end of 2013), which follows last year’s Q2-2013 fall from 85,000.

As usual it should be noted that Vodafone doesn’t itself sell a fixed line broadband service to homes and they gave up on their own At Home product in 2011 (here), thus most of their remaining subscribers were inherited through the £1.044bn deal to buy telecoms giant Cable & Wireless Worldwide (here); CWW supplied various broadband services to business customers including LLU lines for ISPs.

Apparently the activity to integrate the UK operations of CWW was accelerated successfully and Vodafone said that it was continuing to deliver cash and capex synergies “as planned“. The sales pipeline is now also growing, which they expect to materialise into revenue increases in the 2015 financial year.

Meanwhile the UK rollout of 4G services continued following the launch in August 2013, with services now available in 14 cities and over 200 towns, with over 637,000 4G enabled customer plans (including Mobile Broadband). The operator also noted that they were “making significant progress in network performance, particularly in the London area“.

Overall Vodafone said that they aimed to reach 91% population coverage of 4G across Europe by 2016, while the UK target remains 98% by the end of 2015 (currently hovering around 40%).