O2 who are still one of the newer entrants to the UK broadband scene, but are continuing to grow at a very rapid pace, added 52,398 customers in the second quarter of 2009. They had a total of 456,882 broadband lines in the UK at the end of June, compared to the 267,090 that was announced in November 2008.
Telefonica the parent group is believed to include the customer numbers from the Be subsidiary, who are best known for being early pioneers of ADSL2+ Annex M which can provide upload speeds of 2.5Mbps on shorter phone lines.
There was criticism of the recent Ofcom speed report, that by only covering the providers it could get a statistically significant result for up to 8Meg services when using just 1600 testing locations, it was mis-representing the market. To some extent these latest results show the problem clearly, i.e. the market is changing and by burying the performance of ADSL2+ services it may have resulted in misleading headlines in the mainstream media. The data Ofcom announced suggested ADSL2+ services outperformed the standard up to 8Mbps products by roughly double. Also one problem for some providers is that savvy customers with shorter phone lines may have moved to specialist providers like Be to get speeds well in excess of 12Mbps, leaving suppliers like BT, Tiscali, Orange and others with the less technically aware who have not got their home wiring setup to get the best speeds.
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No wonder Be/O2 have raised the question about how best to manage the network with traffic management (aka throttling).
Looks like the good times may be coming to an end? Hope not.