Ofcom's latest quarterly Telecommunications Market Data Tables (Q3 2011) report has revealed that the UK is now home to a total of 20.275 Million fixed line broadband ISP connections (homes and small businesses), 33.2 Million fixed telephone lines and 81.4 Million active mobile subscribers.

Unfortunately it's hard to draw any firm conclusions from the latest broadband data because Ofcom has radically revised its previous stats. Last year the results for Q2-2011 stood at a total of 20.266m (here) but in this latest report they've slashed the Q2 figures to 20.077m. That's no small shift.

The primary reason for this appears to be BT Retail's DSL subscriber base, which in last year's Q2-2011 report showed as 5,682,000 but has since been revised down to 5,493,000 for the same period in their latest report.

UK Fixed Line Broadband ISP Connections Q3-2011
BT Retail DSL - 5,565,000 (Q2-2011 = 5,682,000 5,493,000)
Other DSL (exc. LLU) - 2,601,000 (Q2-2011 = 2,731,000)
Virgin Media (Cable) - 4,090,000 (Q2-2011 = 4,065,000)
Other inc. (LLU DSL) - 8,020,000 (Q2-2011 = 7,787,000)

The results show that, leaving aside BT's loopy data, unbundled ( LLU ) broadband ISPs (e.g. TalkTalk , Sky Broadband , O2 etc.) have suddenly returned to growth after stalling between Q1 and Q2. In reality Sky's growth appears to be propping this figure up as most of the other LLU providers continue to struggle.

Elsewhere BTWholesale-based (exc. LLU) providers are doing the opposite of LLU services and, after briefly growing in Q2-2011 (they added roughly 200k), have now lost around -130,000 broadband connections. At this point we'd really wish that Ofcom would start reporting statistics for superfast FTTP / FTTH / FTTC lines too, which could impact BT's results.

UPDATE 8th February 2012

We forgot to mention that, separate to this, the Office of the Telecommunications Adjudicator (OTA2) has also published its update for January 2012. This shows that at the end of January 2012 there were 8.02 million unbundled lines ( LLU MPF + SMPF / phone and broadband) and 6.28 million BT Wholesale Line Rental lines. The number of telephone numbers using Carrier Pre-Select was 2.58 million.

Ofcom has also been in touch to say that they will include statistics from fibre optic lines in their next Q4 2011 market data tables report.