Point-Topic reports that the largest six UK ISP's - BT, Virgin Media, The Carphone Warehouse (AOL, TalkTalk), Tiscali (Pipex), Orange and BSkyB (Sky TV), now account for 94% of the retail broadband market.

Overall smaller ISP's lost roughly 2% of their market share to the biggest players, while Virgin and Orange also lost some of theirs to rivals too. Overall market growth has slowed down making it increasingly difficult for ISP's to attract new users.

In other words, the golden days are over and ISP's will need to watch their service quality as well as profit margins to retain a stable share. Competition between providers for each others customer base has certainly become increasingly fierce.