Mobile operator and ISP Vodafone UK has reported that they added +44,000 new fixed line home broadband customers during the last quarter (Q2 FY19) to total 479,000, which is down from the +52,000 added in the previous quarter to June 2018. Meanwhile their mobile base shrank to 17,055,000 (quarterly fall of -377,000).
It’s been a fairly lively quarter for Vodafone. In-between seeing some of their TV adverts banned (here), the operator has also managed to switch-on their first live 5G wireless broadband technology trials via a commercial grade network (here) and will benefit from being the primary ISP partner on Cityfibre’s £2.5bn roll-out of a 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) network to 5 million UK premises by the end of 2024 (here).
Meanwhile it’s good to see that they’ve continued to grow their FTTC (VDSL2) based superfast broadband packages, although they appear to now be suffering from the same market stagnation of older hybrid fibre technologies as other ISPs and growth is slowing. This is particularly notable for Vodafone because they are one of the cheapest ISPs for such services and ordinarily this would drive strong take-up.
Overall UK fixed service revenue still grew 6.2% (Q1: 5.3%) “driven by continued strong momentum in consumer broadband and a return to service revenue growth in business“. Vodafone also confirmed that their new FTTH products with Cityfibre, which went live in Milton Keynes during September 2018 (here), will be rolled out to a further 9 UK cities by early 2019.
We should also point out that the fall in Vodafone’s mobile base mostly reflects prepaid customers, while they actually added +86,000 (net) new contract customers (up from +60K in the previous quarter). On top of that we note that across the EU they now report average Smartphone based 3G / 4G data usage (mobile broadband) of 3.2GB (GigaBytes) per month.