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
- Fixed voice services generated £2.2bn of revenues in 2011 Q3, a 6.0% decline compared to a year previously. During this period call revenues fell by 16.5% and access revenues increased by 3.9%.
- There were 33.2 million fixed lines in 2011 Q3, 234k (0.7%) less than there had been a year previously. Over the same period, total fixed call volumes fell by 10.4% to 28.6 billion minutes.
- BT's share of total fixed voice revenues fell by 0.6 percentage points to 48.9% in the year to 2011 Q3.
Fixed broadband
- There were 20.3 million UK residential and small business fixed broadband connections at the end of 2011 Q3, a 1.2 million (6.3%) increase on a year previously.
- BT continued to be the largest UK fixed broadband provider in terms of connections in 2011 Q3, with 27.4% market share. This was a 0.4 percentage points higher than it had been a year previously.
Mobile
- Mobile services generated nearly £3.9bn of revenues in 2011 Q3, a 1.9% increase compared to a year previously. Revenues from calls to UK fixed and mobile lines fell in the same period, while ‘access and bundled services' revenue increased 4.1% and data services revenue increased 14.2%.
- There were 81.4million active subscribers at the end of 2011 Q3, 1.6% more than one year previously. However, the number of active subscribers rose just 0.2% quarter-on-quarter.
- Call volumes rose just 0.2% between 2010 Q3 and 2011 Q3. The increase was due to greater volumes of off-net mobile calls, international calls and calls made while roaming. SMS and MMS volumes also rose – up 18% on the year and 1.5% on the quarter.
- The number of active mobile broadband (dongle and datacard) subscribers exceeded 5million for the first time, reaching 5.046million at the end of 2011 Q3. This is an increase of 15.5% year-on-year and 1.5% quarter-on-quarter.
Q3 2012 Telecoms Data Tables (CSV, 20.5 KB)
Q3 2012 telecoms data tables (PDF, 53.5 KB)