Ofcom publish a quarterly review of the telecoms market including home phone and broadband services. The latest review for Q4 2008, which has just been published, shows BT’s dominance of the fixed line phone sector, with their share of fixed voice call and access revenues still accounting for 59.7% of the UK total, a fall of only 0.3%.
On the broadband front, growth continued despite the credit crunch. As at December 2008 there were 17.3 million residential and small business UK broadband connections, an increase of 2.1% on the previous quarter.
This resulted in an annual increase of 1.7 million broadband connections in 2008.
BT Broadbandincreased its broadband customer base from 4.1 million to 4.5 million during 2008, whilst Virgin Media increased its broadband base from 3.4 to 3.7 million customers. As a result BT Broadband’s share of broadband connections fell by just 0.1% during Q4 2008 to 26.3%, with Virgin Media’s share at 21.3%
The LLU broadband providers (which includes the market leading DSL broadband providers such as TalkTalk, Tiscali, Sky and O2 Broadband) increased their total broadband connections from 3.76 million in Q4 2007 to 5.5 million in Q4 2008, an increase of 46% over the period. This reflects an intensive period of investment in LLU by the providers and the transitioning of their customers from a standard DSL broadband connection – as well as the addition of wholly new broadband customers.