BT Group publishes latest figures showing growth of demand for fibre services

The growth in the number of UK broadband customers continues and the BT
Group has released its Q4 results for the year ending 31st March 2014 which
show BT Retail now has some 7,261,000 customers. This growth of 170,000
customers for BT Retail in the last quarter accelerates BT Retail away from the
other providers.

The signs of changing times are apparent in the latest financial figures
since BT Business and BT Consumer now sit as separate sections whereas
previously they were merged under the umbrella BT Retail. A rare mention is
made of PlusNet who are usually hidden in the BT figures, Plusnet grew its
customer base by 15% in the last year. The consumer division which is how most
people see BT grew by 170,000 broadband connections and this was even with the
loss of 49,000 customers (the loss may seem high but is lower than the same
quarter 12 months ago). Fibre based broadband is where the future lies and some
249,000 customers (a mixture of new to BT and upgrades) was added to grow the
customer base to over 2.1m. While its easy for people to dismiss the lure of BT
Sport, there are some 3m subscribers via satellite, BT TV, online or app and
the full BT TV service added 46,000 customers. The older pre-YouView era
set-top boxes are to be retired soon and will be swapped out for a YouView
box.

Openreach which is responsible for the copper local loop and the roll-out of
fibre enhancements via the GEA-FTTC and GEA-FTTP products, is reporting the
widely anticipated figure that 19 million UK premises have the option to order
a fibre based service is they wish. There are now some 2.7 million connections
on the FTTC/P network adding 347,000 in the last quarter. The figures on homes
passed, includes 630,000 premises passed under the 44 BDUK projects for which
the build phases are underway, and extra 315,000 premises in the last quarter
saw the option to order a fibre based service to their property.

While there are vocal doubters that the Openreach network is available to so
many people, we looked at the number of premises connected to enabled cabinets
and some rough calculations got us to within a whisker of the announced
figures.

The results particularly for BT Retail go against some of the online
comments people make criticising the BT Sports football rights deal, but we
suspect the silent majority are not that worried about it and just see the
sports package as just another bonus as part of the overall package. The UK is
lucky in that there is almost always a choice of retail broadband provider, and
importantly the pricing is very competitive.