Vodafone’s UK Home Fibre Broadband to Launch in the “Coming Weeks”

Mobile provider Vodafone UK has confirmed today that their consumer focused fixed line superfast “fibre broadband” (FTTC) and phone product(s), which will be called Vodafone Connect, should launch in the “coming weeks“. A TV (IPTV) product will then follow later this year.

The news suggests that Vodafone, which last month opened a new pre-registration page for the service, are keeping to their original target for launching a consumer fixed line service during the spring 2015 window. The operator is also expected to entice their mobile customers away from other ISPs by offering some special triple-play discounts.

At present little is known about the service, although the operator has previously informed ISPreview.co.uk that they will connect their existing fibre optic broadband network to around 1,000 of BT’s parent telephone exchanges in order to cover around 80% of the country by the summer. “We will be putting in our routers at the VDSL [FTTC] parent exchanges,” said a Vodafone spokesperson.

However they will also need to come up with something special in order to entice customers away from their competitors, which is going to be incredibly difficult given that practically all of the market’s potential niches are already being filled. As such Vodafone Connect might be more focused on stemming customer bleed to rivals like BT.

Separately Vodafone confirmed that the UK population coverage of their 4G (LTE) based Mobile Broadband network had now reached 63% (or 71% based on the Ofcom definition), with 3 million customers subscribed.

The operator also added +2,000 fixed line enterprise broadband customers in the quarter to total 66,000 for the UK, although this is not a reflection of subscribers as that would include those still on their LLU network via ISPs like Tesco Broadband (estimated at around 130,000.. until TalkTalk finishes gobbling them).