The basic comparison of TalkTalk quarterly results which shows a growth of just
5,000 broadband customers hides the reality. The operator in its latest
financial results has revealed its LLU based services are available in over 96%
of UK households with the number of exchanges unbundled at 2,979 and plans to
continue growing.
“Our unbundling programme continued during H1 with 255 new exchanges added
extending our reach to 2,979 exchanges and over 96% of the UK population. We
plan to unbundle additional exchanges in H2 with potential to extend the
programme beyond that as the cost of unbundling exchanges falls and on-net
customer ARPU grows, allowing us to continue to profitably extend our
geographic reach.In conjunction with our unbundling programme, we continue to expand the
capacity of our network, which we expect to grow by 50-100x over the next 3-5
years. The favourable economics of our network, which allows us to lease dark
fibre at very competitive rates, means that we will be able to achieve this
capacity expansion within our long run capex guidance of 6% of revenues.We added 47,000 fibre customers during the quarter to a still modest
142,000. We were pleased with Ofcom’s proposal to introduce a margin squeeze
test in 2014. This marks the beginning of a journey that will, in due course,
enable us to offer our customers a better value fibre product as it becomes
more relevant to more of them.”Key Extracts from TalkTalk results
TalkTalk actually shed 29,000 customers from its non-LLU network, but some
of these will have been existing customers moving to the LLU network as the
network expands. What is clear though is that demand for fibre is starting to
become significant with TalkTalk jumping from 95,000 fibre based customers to
142,000 in the last quarter alone. Another boost to the ARPU is that their
YouView service is increasing in popularity with 557,000 customers and the aim
to have some 1 million on the entry level Essentials TV service in a years
time.
The Margin Squeeze Test is crucial to driving the take-up of superfast fibre
based services, the UK consumer market has largely remained resistant to
increased spending on broadband apart from the areas which had speeds so slow
that reliable TV streaming was not possible.
In return for the Margin Squeeze Test from Ofcom perhaps TalkTalk could
start to sell the GEA-FTTP services from Openreach in areas where it is
available to increase retail competition for consumers. We believe that too
date the small footprint has meant the larger operators have not focussed on
the full fibre product at all.
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expect to grow by 50-100x over the next 3-5 year, that is scary, Talk talk is too big as it is and like sky and Bt wants to take over everything.
Very scary that people will start to have less choice as these over sized companies start snapping up even more smaller ISPs, to get rid of competition.
The 50-100x growth is network size not customer totals, so reflects their belief network will be carrying a lot more and higher res TV
Um, Talk Talk can’t even carry Sd Tv a lot of the time so carrying anything higher will be difficult. even FTTC is not all it is cracked up to be.
If TT adopted the same pricing approach as BT / Plusnet they would get the same return and more sales.
reducing prices doesnt increase takeup when it halts investment meaning nothing to signup to. Personalyl if i was BT I would suspend the rollout tommorow citing if its permenant or temporary depends on ofcom’s reaction, will make ofcom think twice.