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Cable Operator Virgin Media Tops 4.625 Million Broadband Users

Friday, Nov 6th, 2015 (8:18 am) - Score 630

Cable Internet, phone and TV provider Virgin Media (Liberty Global) has published their results to the end of Q3 2015, which reveals that they added +55,500 (net) UK broadband customers in the quarter to make for a total of 4,625,800 (43% take their 100Mbps+ services).

Normally we expected to see a bounce back from ISPs during the third quarter because Q2 tends to suffer due to student related cancellations, while Q3 benefits as those same students return back to their education and sign-up to related connections again.

Otherwise it’s been a fairly busy few months for Virgin Media, which has ramped-up their Project Lighting network expansion that aims to cover 17 million premises in urban areas by 2020 (60-65% UK coverage) and they’ve also boosted their top “Vivid” cable broadband speeds up to 200Mbps (here). Not to mention some public WiFi developments (here).

Elsewhere Virgin Media reports that their Two-Way Homes Passed figure (i.e. homes on those sections of Virgin’s cable network that are technologically capable of providing two-way services, including video and Internet) has reached 12,724,800 and that’s up from 12,684,100 in Q2. This is largely due to their on-going network expansion and they’re targeting 250,000 new premises in 2015 alone.

Mike Fries, Liberty Global CEO, said:

Subscriber growth is back on track with 320,000 RGU additions in the third quarter, including 220,000 new broadband subscribers. This acceleration in volume growth was fuelled by our operations in Germany and the U.K. Continued traction of our cutting-edge Horizon TV platform resulted in a record quarter of almost 250,000 new subscriptions. The execution of our aggressive technology roadmap continues delivering innovative products like our recently launched Replay TV functionality and next-generation WiFi gateway.”

Apparently 56% of all new customers are now choosing ultrafast broadband speeds of 100Mbps+ and indeed 43% of their customer base is now on a related package (up from 40% last quarter). Mind you this is hardly a surprise given the recent speed upgrades and Virgin Media reiterated that they expect 90% of their customers to be within reach of this by the end of 2015 (the rest will follow during early 2016).

The operator is also home to 3,027,300 mobile subscribers, which is up from 3,014,400 in Q2. Meanwhile, on the financial front, Virgin’s monthly Average Revenue Per Customer Relationship (ARPU) fell slightly to £49.77 from £50.56 in Q2, while their total quarterly revenue improved to £1,151.3m (up from £1,147.7m in Q2) and operating income fell to just £65.7m (down from £103.6m in Q2).

Going forward we expect Virgin Media to launch a new 300Mbps tier for businesses during Q1 2016 (here) and this might possibly be accompanied by a similar service option for residential customers. On top of that the operator has also confirmed to us that they plan to launch a new SuperHub3 cable router (here), which is due in the next few months (possibly Q1 2016).

On the downside the operator has delayed their plans for launching a public WiFi sharing service (here), which would have been integrated into their customers SuperHub routers. Apparently the initial trials suffered from some fairly big bugs and those may take time to resolve.

Elsewhere we’ve yet to see Virgin Media start any DOCSIS3.1 trials, which could deliver significantly faster cable broadband speeds in the future. At the last update we were told to expect this sometime next year, although the date keeps being shifted further back.

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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