Telecommunications Market Data Update Q1 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 totaled £1.43bn in Q1 2022; a decrease of £44m (3%) from the previous quarter and £182m (11.3%) year-on-year. BT’s share of these revenues was 49.4%.
The total number of fixed lines (including PSTN lines, ISDN channels and managed VoIP connections) grew by 103k (0.3%) during the quarter to 32.7 million.
UK landlines (including managed VoIP connections) generated 8.8 billion minutes of outgoing calls in Q1 2022, down 301 million minutes (3.3%) from Q4 and 2.9 billion minutes (24.7%) compared to Q1 2021.
Access and add-on call bundle revenues accounted for 89.7% of total fixed voice revenues in Q1 2022, a 1.5 percentage point increase from the same period a year ago.

There were 27.7 million fixed broadband lines at the end of Q1 2022, an increase of 296k (1.1%) from Q1 2021.
The number of ADSL lines fell by 377k (10.1%), while the number of ‘Other inc. FTTx’ lines increased by 348k (1.9%) during the quarter.

Mobile telephony services generated £3.0bn in retail revenues in Q1 2022, a £3m (0.1%) increase from a year previously.
Average monthly retail revenue per subscriber was £11.94 in Q1 2022, with post-pay subscribers generating more revenue than pre-pay users (averaging £14.36 compared to £4.87 for pre-pay).
The number of active mobile subscriptions (excluding M2M) was 85.3 million at the end of Q1 2022, up 1.9 million (2.3%) from the year before.
Over the same period, the number of dedicated mobile broadband subscriptions increased by 0.3 million (5.6%) to 5.0 million.
The number of mobile-originated voice call minutes decreased by 1.5 billion (3.2%) to 46.9 billion minutes year-on-year, with calls to landlines decreasing by 10.6% to 9.4 billion minutes.
The number of mobile messages (including SMS and MMS) saw a year-on-year decline, down 0.1 billion messages (1.3%) to 9.5 billion.
Data usage continued to rise rapidly, with volumes up 311 PB (24.3%) year-on-year to 1,592 PB.