The communications regulator, Ofcom UK, has released its latest quarterly Telecommunications Market Data Tables Q1-2011, which includes an interesting breakdown of fixed line home (residential) and small business internet customers. It finds that the UK is now home to a total of 19,920,000 broadband ISP connections (up by +340,000 from 19.58m in Q4-2010), which represents a slowdown from the +459,000 added between Q3 and Q4 last year.

BT Retail's market share has also managed to grow slightly from 27.5% in Q4-2010 to 27.8% in Q1-2011. As usual some of this growth has come from BTWholesale based (Other DSL) broadband ISPs rather than their cheaper and more flexible unbundled ( LLU ) or cable ( Virgin Media ) based rivals, which added connections.

UK Fixed Line Broadband ISP Subscribers - Q1-2011
BT Retail DSL - 5,543,000 (Q4-2010 = 5,387,000)
Other DSL (exc. LLU) - 2,511,000 (Q4-2010 = 2,547,000)
Virgin Media (Cable) - 4,078,000 (Q4-2010 = 4,028,000)
Other inc. (LLU DSL) - 7,788,000 (Q4-2010 = 7,618,000)

The information also revealed that retail fixed line voice revenues managed to remain unchanged from Q4-2010 at £2.3bn in Q1 2011 and, by the end of Q1-2011, there were 33.3 million fixed phone lines (down by 568,000 from one year ago). Fixed line call volumes also fell by 10.1% to 30.9 billion minutes over the same period.

By contrast mobile phone based voice and data ( Mobile Broadband ) services managed to generate revenues of £3.5bn in Q1-2011, which is £15m (-0.4%) less than a year ago. Mobiles also accounted for 31.0 billion minutes of calls, which is almost identical to fixed line services.

Sadly the total number of UK mobile phone connections fell by 39,000 to 81.1 million in Q1 2011 and most interesting of all is the fact that 5 million (6.1%) of the total were dedicated Mobile Broadband Datacards or USB Modem (Dongles) based services.

Telecommunications Market Data Tables Q1-2011 (PDF)
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/research/cmr/q12011.pdf