Sky Broadband cements second place behind BT, above Virgin Media with almost 5.2m customers

Sky Broadband has secured its position as the UK’s second-biggest ISP by subscriber size. While still behind BT, it’s comfortably above Virgin Media. 

The broadband, satellite TV and phone company added 70,000 broadband subscribers in the last three months, taking its previous total number of broadband subscribers to 5,197,000, up from 5,127,000. 

This is down from growth of 110,000 reported in the previous three months, but represents an annual increase of 810,000. 

At the last count, BT still leads the pack with over 7.1 million broadband customers while Virgin Media has 4.5 million subscribers. 

Sky says its offer of TV, broadband and landline phone services – ‘triple play’ in industry-speak – continues be popular with customers, with 37 per cent of subscribers now taking all three services from Sky. 

In the last three months Sky also finished migrating O2 broadband customers onto its network. An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 former O2 customers are thought to have moved from Sky to other ISPs, which perhaps accounts for Sky’s lower rate of growth this quarter. 

Sky’s results did not mention the recent plans to launch gigabit fibre broadband in York, as part of a joint venture with TalkTalk and CityFibre. 

As this project isn’t expected to start delivering FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) broadband until 2015, it’s unlikely that we’ll see this impact on Sky’s broadband figures for another year at least. 

Unlike TalkTalk, Sky has yet to start revealing which of its customers are taking FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet)-based broadband. Upgrades by BT’s network arm Openreach alongside the various BDUK (Broadband Delivery for the UK) regional projects has seen millions of UK homes able to access FTTC lines. Until Sky starts breaking down the figures, there’s currently no telling how popular packages like Sky Fibre and Sky Fibre Pro are with customers.