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BT Top 7.59m Broadband Subscribers and Grow FTTC to Cover 22M Premises

Friday, Jan 30th, 2015 (9:11 am) - Score 2,196

BT has today published its latest results for Q4-2014 (calendar), which revealed that their retail division had added +119,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter to total 7,592,000 (up from the +88k added in Q3 and the +104k in Q2). Meanwhile almost 22 million UK premises can now access the operators “Fibre Broadband” (FTTC/P) network.

BT’s consumer division added 209,000 FTTC/P subscribers in the quarter (up slightly from +203k in Q3 2014), which takes their total subscriber base to 2,744,000. By contrast BTOpenreach, which covers the whole market and includes take-up from BT as well as other ISPs like Sky Broadband and TalkTalk etc., reports that the FTTC/P subscribers increased by +375,000 in Q3 to top 3,738,000 (up from +344k in Q3). In other words, BT’s consumer division still dominates.

Overall Openreach reported that their total active UK broadband lines topped 19,058,000 (+258k in Q4 vs +182k in Q3), which among other things included 8,371,000 fully unbundled (MPF LLU) and 1,222,000 shared unbundled (SMPF LLU) lines (consumer LLU lines are dominated by Sky Broadband and TalkTalk).

BT Wholesale also runs a total of 1,873,000 external broadband lines for other ISPs (note: this excludes the broadband lines that BT’s own consumer division uses), which is actually up by +14k in the quarter after showing -8k in Q3. Until today BTWholesale had seen almost two years’ worth of consecutive quarterly declines.

On the TV front BT’s consumer IPTV (YouView + BTVision) service saw subscribers increase by +45,000 in the quarter to total 1,090,000 (up from +38k in Q3).

Gavin Patterson, BT Group’s CEO, said:

This quarter we have delivered good growth in profit before tax and strong free cash flow. Openreach achieved the highest growth in the number of landlines on record. It was also our best ever quarter for fibre broadband net additions. All the major communications providers are responding to the strong market demand for fibre broadband, helping to drive take-up in what is already a very competitive market.

Our superfast fibre broadband network now covers around three-quarters of the UK. BT has been at the forefront of fibre innovation and investment, from which all communications providers benefit. We aim to keep it that way. So today we’re announcing large-scale pilots this summer of ultrafast broadband with G.fast. We now think we can deploy this technology at scale which will enable us to deliver ultrafast speeds of up to 500Mbps to most of the UK within a decade.

I am pleased that we have agreed the 2014 triennial funding valuation and recovery plan with the Trustee of the BT Pension Scheme. The funding deficit is £7.0bn at 30 June 2014, an increase from 2011 reflecting the low interest rate environment. Over the next three years we will pay £2.0bn, which is less than we paid over the previous three years. We have agreed a 16 year recovery plan reflecting the strength and sustainability of our future cash flow generation.

Mobility is a key growth area for us. We are making good progress on our due diligence in relation to a possible acquisition of EE and will make further announcements in due course. In the meantime, our Consumer mobile launch plans remain on track.”

Overall, aside from today’s big G.fast news, there wasn’t anything else particularly noteworthy in BT’s results, which appear to show that they had a generally good final quarter of 2014. However it’s good to see that the complications arising from BT’s move to gobble EE don’t currently appear to have delayed the launch of their consumer 4G mobile tariffs, which are still due for a spring 2015 introduction.

On the financial front BT Group reported quarterly revenue reached £4,475m (up from £4,441m in Q3) and their reported profits before tax topped £694m (up from £563m). Meanwhile total net debt for the group, over nine months to the end of 2014, was £6,202m (down by £1,438m in the period).

Separately BTOpenreach reported that their Q4 revenue was £1,255m, which is a slight improvement from £1,245m in Q3. Incidentally Openreach now looks after some 25,225,000 total physical lines, which is up by +111k in Q4 and that’s well above the +15k added in Q3.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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