Vodafone Reports UK Broadband Base of 1.16 Million Customers

Vodafone UK has published their latest quarterly (Q3 FY23) results, which states that their fixed broadband ISP base saw strong growth to total 1.158 million customers (up by 47k in the quarter vs 39k in Q2 FY23), while their mobile base also grew again to total 17.802 million (up by 259k vs 321k in the previous quarter).

The main developments from Vodafone, at least over the past quarter, have come via the expansion of their Pro II broadband packages to business customers (here) and their first deployment of 4G and 5G OpenRAN sites in urban areas (here).

On top of that, they’ve also worked with Three UK and O2 to create one of the UK’s first joint mast sites in Scotland under the £1bn Shared Rural Network (SRN) project (here) and will this month start switching off 3G services (here). Finally, they became one of the first UK mobile operators to launch a trial 5G Standalone (SA) network for customers (here).

Sadly, the latest results don’t give us much information on their fixed broadband base (other than to confirm a strong level of growth), which supplies consumers via broadband (FTTC and FTTP) products from Openreach and CityFibre’s respective networks.

As for their mobile base, the operator reported a quarterly addition of 94,000 Pay Monthly customers (up from 58,000 last quarter) and a rise of 165,000 in Prepaid / Pay As You Go customers (down sharply from 263,000). In addition, quarterly mobile broadband (data) usage across their UK network reached 417,237 TeraBytes (up from 390,201 TB last quarter).

Margherita Della Valle, Vodafone Group CEO, said:

“Although we’re continuing to target our financial guidance for the year, the recent decline in revenue in Europe shows we can do better. We need to do more for our customers by delivering quality connectivity in an easy way.

We’ve already taken action, including simplifying our structure to give local markets full autonomy and accountability to make the best commercial decisions for their customers. In addition, we now have initiatives underway to generate around half of our €1 billion cost savings target. There is more to do and our focus is to provide a better service to our customers, become a simpler business and deliver growth.”

Overall, the operator saw their quarterly UK service revenue decrease to €1,327m (down from €1,352m in the previous quarter). The full report is here (PDF).