Telecommunications Market Data Update Q3 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 £1.42bn in Q3 2022; a decrease of £21m (1.5%) from the previous quarter and £97m (6.4%) year-on-year. BT’s share of these revenues was 48.9%.
The number of fixed exchange lines (including PSTN, ISDN and managed VoIP connections) fell by 492k (1.6%) during the quarter to 30.5 million. This decline is due to the growing availability and take-up of standalone broadband services.
Total fixed-originated call volumes decreased by 138 million minutes (1.7%) during the quarter, to 7.8 billion minutes.

There were 27.8 million fixed broadband lines at the end of Q3 2022, an increase of 91k (0.3%)year-on-year.
There were 19.4 million ‘other inc. FTTx’ broadband connections (predominantly fibre-to-the cabinet and full fibre connections) at the end of Q3 2022, accounting for 69.9% of all lines.
The number of ADSL lines fell by 209k (6.6%) during the quarter, while the number of cable lines increased by 13k (0.2%) and the number of ‘other inc. FTTx’ lines increased by 154k (0.8%).

Mobile telephony services generated £3.32bn in retail revenues in Q3 2022, a £231m (7.5%) increase from a year previously.
Average monthly retail revenue per subscriber was £12.74 in Q3 2022, with post-pay subscribers generating more revenue than pre-pay users (averaging £15.41 compared to £5.22 for pre-pay).
The number of active mobile subscriptions (excluding M2M) was 87.5 million at the end of Q3 2022, up 3.0 million (3.5%) from the year before.
Over the same period, the number of dedicated mobile broadband subscriptions increased by 0.1 million (1.2%) to 5.3 million.
The number of mobile messages (including SMS and MMS) saw a year-on-year decline, down 1.5 billion messages (14.3%) to 9.1 billion.
The number of mobile-originated voice call minutes decreased by 4.3 billion (9.4%) to 41.1 billion minutes year-on-year, with calls to landlines decreasing by 12.6% to 8.5 billion minutes.