BT has signed up almost 7 million customers to its broadband services according to its latest quarterly results.
A total of 156,000 new customers signed up over the last three months, almost double the amount that was added a year ago.
In the last three months 195,000 homes took a superfast fibre-based service from BT, although some of these were existing customers upgrading from copper-based BT Broadband services.
Read more about the UK’s Broadband Customer League TableOf BT’s 6.9 million broadband customers, roughly 1.7 million of these are taking a fibre-based BT Infinity product.
That’s one tenth of how many people could potentially take fibre broadband from Openreach, BT’s network arm. This suggests that Openreach well on track to get 19 million locations connected to fibre-based broadband by Spring 2014.
Openreach grew by 168,000 in the last three months. In total, the network, including retail lines and wholesale rental lines, now covers over 9 million premises.
BT chief executive officer Gavin Patterson, commenting on the results, said: “These are good results, with growth in earnings per share and free cash flow. This has been our strongest ever quarter for fibre take-up with Openreach net connections up 70 per cent.
“Our fibre network now passes more than 17 million premises. It is open to all and many other service providers have now got behind it.”
BT says that 316,000 customers took fibre-based services from Openreach in the last quarter. BT doesn’t say how many of these customers were upgrading to BT Infinity from copper-based BT Broadband, but revealed that around 40 per cent of this figure were customers moving from other ISPs including Sky and TalkTalk to BT.
Despite recent gains made by Sky and EE, BT retains its top spot in the UK’s broadband league table.
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