Vodafone Hits 1.05 Million UK Fixed Broadband ISP Customers

Vodafone UK has today published their latest results (financial Q4 FY22), which reveals that their fixed broadband base has finally passed the million mark to total 1,050,000 (up by +59k in the quarter vs +29k in Q3 FY22). But it’s unclear whether they’ve managed to achieve national availability across CityFibre’s FTTP network, yet.

The big news this time around is that Vodafone UK’s fixed broadband base has finally broken the million mark and 527,000 of those are “converged” subscribers (i.e. they take both a mobile and fixed broadband package from the operator). Customers on this service tend to reflect a mix of hybrid fibre FTTC and full fibre FTTP connections on both Openreach and CityFibre’s UK networks (they’ve never given a split of these figures).

The growth of Vodafone’s fixed line base may also add some context for recent reports, which suggested that the operator might be considering a move to acquire TalkTalk (here). Both operators tend to focus on the lower-cost side of consumer broadband provision, but at present this interest doesn’t appear to have translated into any solid negotiations. But Vodafone is also being linked to merger talks with Three UK (here). Fun.

As for mobile, the operator’s UK customer base grew to 17,107,000 (up by +51,000 in the quarter), which reflects the quarterly addition of +37,000 Pay Monthly customers (down from +152k last quarter) and an increase of 14,000 prepaid (Pay As You Go) users – reversing several consecutive YEARS of prepaid decline. In addition, quarterly mobile broadband (data) usage across their network reached 325,968 TeraBytes, which is up from 318,237TB last quarter.

Nick Read, Group CEO, said:

“We delivered a good financial performance in the year with growth in revenues, profits and cash flows, in line with our medium-term financial ambitions. Our organic growth underpinned a step-change in our return on capital, which improved by 170bps to 7.2%. Whilst we are not immune to the macroeconomic challenges in Europe and Africa, we are positioned well to manage them and we expect to deliver a resilient financial performance in the year ahead.

Our near-term operational and portfolio priorities remain unchanged from those communicated 6 months ago. We are focused on improving the commercial performance in Germany, actively pursuing opportunities with Vantage Towers and strengthening our market positions in Europe. These actions, together with the simplification of our portfolio and the ongoing delivery of our organic growth strategy, will create further value for our shareholders.”

The other issue worth noting stems from Vodafone’s November 2021 announcement (here), which saw them commit to make their Gigafast Broadband packages available across CityFibre’s entire UK Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network (nationwide) – currently covering c.1.5 million premises – and seemingly by the end of April 2022. But they also used the less specific “spring 2022” to reflect this goal, and we’re still in that.

Today’s update simply states: “In November 2021, we announced the expansion of our long-term strategic partnership agreement with CityFibre. In conjunction with our existing partnership with Openreach, our NGN broadband services are now available to 29.3 million households.” But this includes FTTC lines, which sadly masks their FTTP specific reach on both networks.

Overall, the operator saw their quarterly UK service revenue increase to €1,341m (up from €1,292m in the previous quarter). The full report is here (PDF).