Telecommunications Market Data Update Q3 2011

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 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.

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 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.