Telecommunications Market Data Update Q1 2021

Published: 29 July 2021

Last updated: 16 March 2023

In the following section we highlight some of the key trends emerging this quarter from the data we collect on the UK telecommunications sector.

Fixed voice services

UK fixed voice services generated £1.6bn in revenue in Q1 2021, a fall of £82m (4.9%) compared to the previous quarter. BT’s share of these revenues was 51.0%, a 0.6pp quarter-on-quarter increase.
Access and add-on call bundle revenues accounted for 88.3% of fixed voice revenues in Q1 2021.
The total number of fixed lines (including PSTN lines, ISDN channels and managed VoIP connections) fell by 551k (1.7%) to 31.8 million in the year to March 2021.
There were 11.2 billion minutes of fixed-originated calls in Q1 2021. This was 764 million minutes (3.9%) higher than a year previously, despite a decline of 360 million minutes (3.1%) during the quarter.

There were 27.4 million fixed broadband lines at the end of Q1 2021, an increase of 85k (0.3%) from the previous quarter and 454k (1.7%) year-on-year.
The number of ADSL lines fell by 564k (11%) in Q1 2021, while the number of cable broadband lines increased by 25k (less than 1%) and the number of ‘Other inc. FTTx’ lines (predominantly fibre broadband connections) increased by 624k (4%).
There were 17.4 million ‘other inc. FTTx’ broadband lines at the end of Q1 2021, accounting for 63.6% of all UK fixed broadband connections.

Mobile telephony services generated £3.03bn in retail revenues in Q1 2021, a £176m (5.5%) decrease from a year previously.
Average monthly revenue per subscriber was £12.09 in Q1 2021, with post-pay subscribers generating more revenue than pre-pay users on average (£14.63 compared to £4.92).
The number of active mobile subscriptions (excluding M2M) was 83.3 million at the end of Q1 2021, down 0.1 million (0.1%) from a year previously.
Over the same period, the number of dedicated mobile broadband subscriptions increased by 0.4 million (8.5%) to 4.8 million.
The number of mobile-originated voice call minutes increased by 3.6 billion (8.0%) to 48.5 billion minutes from Q1 2020 to Q1 2021, with calls to landlines increasing by 8.3% to 10.5 billion minutes.
Roaming call volumes decreased by 38.4% to 0.3 billion minutes compared to Q1 2020, the key driver of this fall being travel restrictions that were introduced to combat the spread of Covid-19.
The number of mobile messages (including SMS and MMS) saw a significant year-on-year decline, down 5.1 billion messages (34.8%) to 9.6 billion.
Data usage continued to increase rapidly, up 280 PB (27.9%) year-on-year to 1,281 PB.