Posted: 03rd Nov, 2011 By: MarkJ

National UK telecoms operator BT has today released its latest financial results to 30th September 2011 (Q3), which saw its retail broadband ISP subscriber base top
5,998,000 customers (it's since gone over 6 Million). This represents an
impressive quarterly growth of +166,000 net additions, compared with +141,000 in Q2.
Elsewhere BT's new 'up to' 40Mbps (rising to 80Mbps in 2012) superfast broadband ( FTTC ) service is now available to 6 Million UK homes and businesses (up from 5 Million in Q2). BT added a further
+88,000 to its related BT-Infinity product in the quarter (up from +71,000 in Q2), which takes the total to over 300,000 (double what it was six months ago).
Ian Livingston, BT's CEO, said:
"We have increased cash flow, profits and underlying revenue in the quarter. This progress has been supplemented with positive operational performances in most of our businesses. We achieved a market leading 63% share of broadband net additions and another quarter of growth in fixed lines.
We expect to continue to offset the economic headwinds through improved customer service and processes, better efficiency, and investment in the future of the business. This strategy and our financial results allow us to invest when others are merely talking about it.
We are accelerating our fibre roll-out programme to cover two-thirds of the UK by the end of 2014 – one year earlier than planned and creating 520 new jobs. With the already announced government support, we believe there is the potential for fibre-based services to reach more than 90% of the UK within a few years thereafter."
Separately the
BT Vision IPTV service (broadband TV) managed to boost its growth by adding
+44,000 new subscribers in the quarter for a total of
639,000, which is significantly up from just +23,000 added in Q2.
BT Financial Summary (Q3-2011)
• Revenue of £4,894m (2%)
• EBITDA of £1,495m (3%)
• Profit before tax of £552m
• Earnings per share of 6.4p
• Free cash flow of £671m
• Net debt (year) of £8.317bn
BT's Wholesale division reports that it
upgraded 145 telephone exchanges in the quarter to support its
Wholesale Broadband Connect (WBC) service ( e.g. ADSL2+), which makes for a total of 1,450 WBC exchanges (covering 70% of UK premises).
BT Wholesale is now home to
8,510,000 fixed broadband lines, while BT has also fully unbundled (MPF) 4,885,000 telephone lines and 2,840,000 shared (SMPF) lines. Unbundled ( LLU ) lines are typically used by ISPs, such as O2 , Sky Broadband and TalkTalk etc., to offer cheaper and more flexible broadband and phone services.