UK Residential and Small Business Broadband Lines Top 25 Million – Q3 2016

The latest Telecoms Market Data Tables from Ofcom have confirmed that the United Kingdom is home to a total of 25,087,000 fixed home and small business broadband lines (up by +229K in Q3 vs +206K in Q2 2016), with nearly half (44.32%) being Next Generation Access (NGA) services.

Once again the results reveal an on-going trend of older and slower copper ADSL / ADSL2+ broadband lines being swapped for faster NGA connections. Cable (DOCSIS) based lines, such as those supplied by Virgin Media, now make up 19.44% of the total and “fibre” (FTTC/P/H/B) based connections hold 24.89% (most of these come from Openreach’s FTTC / VDSL2 technology).

Meanwhile BT’s Consumer / Retail division has started to lose a tiny bit of its market share, although it’s too early to say whether this will become an on-going trend. Rival ISPs tend to pick up a little under half of Openreach’s new quarterly FTTC/P additions, with BT Retail grabbing the rest (example). However the expansion of Virgin Media’s cable network and the growth of altnet FTTP/H providers will also be playing their part in the market balance.

The update also reveals that the total number of fixed phone / exchange lines (including PSTN and ISDN channels) is now 33.6 million, which reflects 26,359,000 residential lines (up from 26,262,000 in Q2) and 7,226,000 business lines (down from 7,357,000 in Q2). In both markets BT lost the most lines, with Virgin Media and other ISPs tending to pick-up their connections in the residential market. Meanwhile business lines suffered a general decline across the board, with Virgin Media being the only one to hold level.

Elsewhere total UK fixed line voice retail revenues were £2.1bn in Q3 2016, which is in line with the previous quarter and a £41m (2.0%) increase compared to Q3 2015. BT’s share of these revenues was 44.9%, which is 0.9% points higher than it had been a year previously. Access revenues accounted for 74.7% of the total retail fixed voice revenue in Q3 2016, a 3.1% point increase compared to Q3 2015.

Finally, on the Mobile telecoms front, the UK is home to 83.74 million mobile subscriptions and that’s up from 83.57m in Q2. Mobile telephony services also generated £3.9bn in retail revenues during Q3 2016, which is up by £72m (1.9%) in the quarter and a £47m (1.2%) increase compared to Q3 2015.

The total number of outgoing SMS and MMS messages was 24.1 billion in Q3 2016, in line with the previous quarter but down 1.0 billion messages (4.2%) compared to Q3 2015.