Vodafone UK Home Broadband ISP Grows to 316000 Subscribers

The latest Q4 2017 (calendar) results from Vodafone UK reveal that their fixed line broadband base grew by +39,000 in the quarter to total 316,000 (up from the +33K added in Q3), which in recent months has been boosted by some very aggressive FTTC price cutting.

Meanwhile Vodafone’s mobile customer base shrank by -25,000 in the quarter to total 17,609,000. Interestingly the operator’s report doesn’t offer much detail on their 4G uptake and deployment progress, which is perhaps because they’re going through a bit of a rough patch.

On the financial side, Vodafone reported quarterly UK service revenues of £1,496m (down from £1,510m in Q3). Otherwise there’s not a lot else to highlight and you can read the full results here. The main UK development for the operator is still their deal with Cityfibre to potentially rollout a 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) broadband network for up to 5 million UK premises by 2025 (here), which will start in Milton Keynes (here).

UK Results Overview

Service revenue declined 4.8%* (Q2: -3.0%*). The slowdown in quarterly trends reflects the impact from handset financing, which weighed on organic service revenue by 3.6 percentage points (Q2: -1.5 percentage points). Excluding the impact of handset financing and the drag from regulation, service revenue trends were stable at 0.4%* (Q2: 0.6%*), with improvements in consumer mobile and fixed line being offset by a slowdown in Enterprise fixed partly relating to project phasing.

Mobile service revenue declined 5.2%* (Q2: -3.7%*), but grew 1.6%* (Q2: 1.0%*) excluding the impact of handset financing and regulation. This underlying growth was supported by more-for-more actions, a better inflow mix of higher-value customers, and RPI-linked consumer price increases. Enterprise continued to decline in a competitive market, however ARPU trends improved with an increasing proportion of customers adopting our bespoke SoHo tariffs. Total contract customers grew 6,000 (Q2: -3,000); excluding Talkmobile, our low-end mobile brand which is being phased out, net additions grew by 41,000 (Q2: 26,000). Our good commercial momentum was supported by further improvements in consumer net promoter scores and record network performance.

Fixed service revenue declined 3.6%* (Q2: -0.6%*), reflecting customer losses in prior quarters and project phasing during the quarter in Enterprise. These more than offset our strong momentum in consumer broadband, where we enjoyed our best ever quarter of consumer broadband net additions (Q3: 39,000 households). In total we now serve 316,000 customers.