Telecommunications Market Data Update Q4 2022

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 service revenues totalled £1.39bn in Q4 2022; a decrease of £28m (2.0%) from the previous quarter and £99m (6.6%) year-on-year. BT’s share of these revenues was 49.1%.
The number of fixed exchange lines (including PSTN, ISDN and managed VoIP connections) fell by 751k (2.5%) during the quarter to 29.8 million. This decline is due to the growing availability and take-up of standalone broadband services.
Total fixed-originated call volumes decreased by 176 million minutes (2.2%) during the quarter, to 7.6 billion minutes.

There were 28.0 million fixed broadband lines at the end of Q4 2022, an increase of 185k (0.7%) year-on-year.
There were 19.7 million ‘other inc. FTTx’ broadband connections (predominantly fibre-to-the cabinet and full fibre connections) at the end of Q4 2022, accounting for 70.5% of all lines.
The number of ADSL lines fell by 117k (4.0%) during the quarter, while the number of cable lines increased by 28k (0.5%) and the number of ‘other inc. FTTx’ lines increased by 175k (0.9%).

Mobile telephony services generated £3.3bn in retail revenues in Q4 2022, a £161.1m (5.2%) increase from a year previously.
Average monthly retail revenue per subscriber was £12.48 in Q4 2022, with post-pay subscribers generating more revenue than pre-pay users (averaging £15.01 compared to £5.28 for pre-pay).
The number of active mobile subscriptions (excluding M2M) was 86.8 million at the end of Q4 2022, up 1.8 million (2.2%) from the year before.
Over the same period, the number of dedicated mobile broadband subscriptions grew by 39k (0.7%) to 5.3 million.
The number of mobile-originated voice call minutes decreased by 4.5 billion (9.6%) to 42.0 billion minutes year-on-year, with calls to landlines decreasing by 13.5% to 8.5 billion minutes.
The number of mobile messages (including SMS and MMS) saw a year-on-year decline, down 1.7 billion messages (16.2%) to 8.8 billion.