Vodafone UK Nears 1 Million Fixed Broadband ISP Customers

UK ISP and mobile operator Vodafone has today published their latest results (financial Q3 FY22), which reveals that their fixed broadband base added another +29k customers (vs +22k in the previous quarter) to make for a total base of 991,000, which should see them pass the magic million mark before their next update.

Naturally, most of the big developments from Vodafone in the past quarter have concerned their mobile network, which includes their recently revealed plan to switch-off 3G mobile services by 2023 (here). On top of that, they’ve also begun to deploy their first commercial OpenRAN network into rural parts of England and Wales (here).

Speaking of mobile, the operator’s UK customer base grew to 17,056,000 (up by +62,000 in the quarter), which reflects the strong quarterly addition of +152,000 Pay Monthly mobile customers and the loss of 90,000 Prepaid (Pay As You Go) users. In addition, quarterly mobile data (mobile broadband) usage across their entire network reached 318,237 TeraBytes, which is up from 308,945TB in the previous quarter.

However, the big news this time around is that Vodafone UK’s fixed broadband base is about to reach the 1 million mark (currently 991,000), with 496,000 of those being “converged” subscribers (i.e. they take a mobile plan and fixed broadband from the same operator). Related customers tend to reflect a mix of hybrid fibre FTTC and full fibre FTTP connections on Openreach and CityFibre’s UK networks.

Nick Read, Group CEO, said:

“Our team has delivered another solid quarter, demonstrating the sustainability of our growth strategy and medium term ambition. This performance keeps us firmly on track to deliver FY22 results in line with the higher guidance we set out in November.”

Overall, the operator saw their quarterly UK service revenue increase to €1,292m (up from €1,265m in the previous quarter). The full report is here (PDF).