Broadband News
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OFCOM tracks steady growth in broadband connections.
10 Feb 2009 | 07.32 Europe/London
OFCOM's latest quarterly telecomms market report for Q3 2008 shows an increase in residential and small business broadband connections of 322,000 in the three months July-September 20008.
The annual increase over September 2007 was just under 2 million connections so we can see that growth is falling away in the classic S shaped curve of technology sales.
Within the 322,000 figure Virgin Media acquired 63,000 or just under 20% of the market increase, taking them to 3.626 million or 21.4% of the total. With presence in about 50% of the geographical market this would suggest VM manage to capture around 45% of the market in their cabled areas.
There is a continuing decline in the number of ADSL subscribers using BT Wholesale ADSL via 3rd party ISPs, down 132,000 in the quarter. BT Retail ADSL continues to grow with 68,000 extra connections. At least part of the Wholesale decline will be due to migration from that platform to LLU of existing customers of O2, Sky etc or use of LLU Wholesale but as the number of new LLU exchange builds drops to a trickle this effect will diminish.
LLU broadband saw an increase of 323,000 lines which is practically the same number as the total market increase. Clearly churn of consumers between suppliers is becoming a significant factor and with LLU having passed the 5m lines mark we would expect this to continue as Sky and O2 seek to address their late start and current underperformance in terms of market share from their existing customer base.
The annual increase over September 2007 was just under 2 million connections so we can see that growth is falling away in the classic S shaped curve of technology sales.
Within the 322,000 figure Virgin Media acquired 63,000 or just under 20% of the market increase, taking them to 3.626 million or 21.4% of the total. With presence in about 50% of the geographical market this would suggest VM manage to capture around 45% of the market in their cabled areas.
There is a continuing decline in the number of ADSL subscribers using BT Wholesale ADSL via 3rd party ISPs, down 132,000 in the quarter. BT Retail ADSL continues to grow with 68,000 extra connections. At least part of the Wholesale decline will be due to migration from that platform to LLU of existing customers of O2, Sky etc or use of LLU Wholesale but as the number of new LLU exchange builds drops to a trickle this effect will diminish.
LLU broadband saw an increase of 323,000 lines which is practically the same number as the total market increase. Clearly churn of consumers between suppliers is becoming a significant factor and with LLU having passed the 5m lines mark we would expect this to continue as Sky and O2 seek to address their late start and current underperformance in terms of market share from their existing customer base.