BT has cemented its position as top dog in the UK broadband market, head and shoulders above Sky and Virgin Media.
Over 100,000 new subscribers joined BT in the last three months, putting BT closer to the 7 million mark.
The BT Openreach network expanded by 283,000 in the last quarter of 2012, with 136,000 of those new customers taking BT Broadband. BT’s total broadband subscriber base now stands at 6.71 million.
Read more about Recombu Digital’s UK Broadband Customer League Table
When Sky starts to add the 500,000-odd customers it’ll inherit from the O2 and Be Broadband acquisition, this will put it over 5 million. Impressive, but it looks like BT is still sitting pretty, for the time being at least.
BT’s rollout of fibre-based broadband has continued and is starting to become popular with customers. In the last quarter, 270,000 new fibre broadband customers were added, with 211,000 of those being BT Retail customers.
In total, 1.5 million homes and businesses now take fibre-based broadband from the Openreach network and 1.3 million of those will be on BT Broadband lines.
BT Vision also reported growth between January and March this year, adding 40,000.
This more than half the number of people who added BT Vision in the previous quarter (21,000) but it’s expected with the announcement of BT Sport that these numbers will start to pick up.
BT chief executive Ian Livingston said:
“We are driving fibre across the UK, launching high quality sports channels, investing in the high-growth regions of the world and will use our WiFi capabilities and 4G spectrum to make sure our customers will be the best connected.”
BT Sport is expected to be a factor in retaining BT’s dominance of the broadband market. Available to anyone with a BT Broadband connection and accessible through BT Vision, BT YouView and Sky TV, as well as online through a BT Sport app, it’ll help retain customers who fancy a bit of sport on the side.
Though BT’s TV customer base is growing, it’s still a way off coming close to giving Sky and Virgin Media much to worry about. Come August, this situation could be pretty different.
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