BT has published its annual set of financial results for the year ending 31st December 2005. BT Retails own ISP's accumulated a total of 2,328,000 broadband users, while its wholesale division ended the year with 6.9m connections:

Broadband revenue grew by 40 per cent to £188 million. The growth of broadband continues with 2,328,000 BT Retail connections at December 31, 2005, an increase of 10 per cent in the quarter. Net additions of 217,000 were a 31 per cent share of the BT Wholesale broadband DSL additions in the quarter, an increase of 4 percentage points compared to previous quarter. Market share additions of DSL plus LLU, were 28 per cent in the quarter, an increase of 3 percentage points compared to the previous quarter.

In October, we re-launched our simplified consumer broadband tariffs, offering new and existing customers wireless routers as standard in the higher tier products, enhanced security features and the option of price competitive Voice over IP (VoIP) services. Overall consumer broadband net additions were 176,000 for the quarter, an increase in net additions of 11 per cent compared with the previous quarter.

Business broadband sales orders increased over 30 per cent in the quarter. The number of customers also taking additional value add services increased over one hundred percent in the quarter with each broadband order including an average of 1.1 value add services.

Broadband growth has certainly slowed a bit from its 2004 spike, although that was to be expected and has been the case for awhile now. BT will face tougher competition from LLU (non-BT) based broadband services during 2006, if predictions are to be believed.

Sadly there's no real mention of any future services, such as what might come after the operator finalises its 8Mbps ADSL product. We know that they're leaning towards VDSL over ADSL2+, but nothing concrete is known.