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O2 market share for broadband drops again
Thursday 28 February 2013 16:34:23 by Andrew Ferguson

While O2 has secured two blocks of 10 MHz in the most attractive 800 MHz band for 4G mobile broadband services, the story is not so rosy in the world of fixed broadband where customer numbers have now dropped to 560,100, which is a 9.7% drop on the same time twelve months ago.

This continued decrease in customer numbers is most likely down to O2 and Be not having embraced FTTC services and the aggressive pricing competition in the UK broadband market. The policy of upselling telephone line rental will go some way to balance the decline in revenue from fixed broadband as over the last 12 months O2 and Be have added 161,300 fixed line rental customers.

[ Topic: Internet Service Providers | 16 comments | link to this item ]

Comments

Posted by lockyatlrg 3 months ago
Only reason I left was no FTTC.

Posted by colinbarrett 3 months ago
Our locality has just (last week) been upgraded by Openreach to FTTC and BT Infinity customers who have already upgraded are benefitting from 76 Mbps down. I'm with O2 and am waiting for them to offer me an upgrade. They'll probably be more expensive than BT but I'm very reluctant to move away from in my recent experience O2's customer service (in Glasgow) is much, much better than BT's (in India).

But O2 really does have to come up with a good deal!

Posted by lockyatlrg 3 months ago
BT has good customer service from the mods on their forum, I have NEVER called the Indians and I have had my problems with FTTC.

Posted by Bin216 3 months ago
O2 and Be are currently part way through rebuilding their core network, and have put FTTC on the back burner until that is finished.

Unfortunately the converged core upgrade is going slowly.

From a list of exchanges they have released (on their forum, summarised www.beusergroup.co.uk), I calculate they have completed about a quater of their exchanges so far, but at the rate they are going it will take around another 20 months to finish.

I'm currently a Be customer, but when FTTC (by end of 2013 according to Openreach), I'm going to have a long hard look at the options.

Posted by batfastad 3 months ago
I've been a Be customer for several years now and although speeds seem to have tailed off in the last few years, I cannot complain about reliability. I reckon my connection was down for 30 mins while they migrated me last year and that's the only down time that I can remember in the last few years.

I don't really care what throttled/managed fibre service BT are currently peddling, you would have to pay me to go anywhere near them. My 13Mb/1Mb ADSL is perfectly adequate.

Posted by Going_Digital 3 months ago
Be/o2 are irrelevant now, after several months of not being able to use iPlayer due to their appalling network and no sign of FTTC I have switched lines to FTTC from Plusnet and IDnet. Be have been promising for years now to fix their network and introduce a fibre offering, I haven't regretted the move. Be even managed to screw things up when I left them causing my openreach installation to be cancelled and without broadband for 2 weeks.
Can't say I care what happens to them any more.

Posted by tommy45 3 months ago
Am i at all suprised ? NO, not in the slightest,Why because they don't get things fixed anywhere near fast enough, and they don't even seem to know if they are offering a unlimited product or not, Kicking customers off without warning for using their connection more than they would like them to, and if it really is true that one or 2 people on any exchange can cause major congestion issues then they seriously need to upgrade the links for exchanges to their core network

Posted by timmay 3 months ago
We were always expecting a decline. Telefonica killed Be*.

Posted by Dixinormous 3 months ago
Telefonica gave Be* millions to upgrade their network, which was getting into strife with no profit to upgrade it further.

The network was built cheaply and the level of usage per customer was very high. O2 was an attempt to dilute that usage with more light users.

Posted by mobilebb 3 months ago
It happened..

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2013/03/uk-isp-o2-and-be-unlimited-sell-home-broadband-service-to-bskyb.html

Posted by herdwick 3 months ago
O2 was a massive marketing fail in fixed line broadband. 22m mobile customers to go at and they didn't even get 1m broadband customers.

Posted by batfastad 3 months ago
Be now part of Sky...
https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/broadbandchanges

There goes their remaining 560,000 customers, including me!

Posted by Scubaholic 3 months ago
Didn't we used to have something called The Competition Commission? Sad day as I have been with BE from the start & apart from a few frustrations they have given me good reliable service & 0800 number for customer service. I was have to leave anyway. They lost their way after being market leaders.

Posted by otester 3 months ago
O2 deserves it, they don't compete so they lose.

Posted by David-Park 3 months ago
I'm with Be, part of O2, and I have been told they are selling out to Sky.

Posted by rainman100 3 months ago
I don't need super fast broadband, 4 gig download speed was fine with O2 . Now they've sold out to Sky I hope they honor their contract until I switch to another provider, I will also be switching my mobile also from O2. I certainly wont be going to Talk Talk or Murdock's empire.