BT Claims Broadband Success With 3 Million Fibre Customers

BT published its financial results for Q4 and the full year running up to the end of March – with revenue for the year dipping 2 per cent to £17.8 billion – and the company also laid out a number of facts and figures concerning its broadband rollout.

ISPreview spotted that BT added 121,000 new broadband users in the last quarter, to bring the total number up to 7.7 million, with just over 3 million of those on BT Infinity fibre (39 per cent of subscribers are now on fibre, to be precise).

A new record was set when it came to fibre broadband for the fourth quarter, with 455,000 new connections being made, which represented an increase of 31 per cent, BT said.

BT also boasted that it now covers over 22 million premises in the UK with superfast broadband, which is three-quarters of the country.

In a statement, the telecoms giant observed that the UK broadband market went up by 248,000 in Q4, and BT grabbed 121,000 of those customers, or 49 per cent of them.

BT commented: “Our investment in superfast fibre broadband is a success story for the UK. To take it further we have announced large-scale trials this summer of ultrafast fibre broadband with G.fast technology.

“With the right investment and regulatory environment, we expect to deploy it at scale helping to make ultrafast broadband speeds of up to 500Mbps available to most of the UK within a decade.”

At the same time, there has recently been slightly concerning talk about the ‘capacity crunch’ which will hit the UK’s overall bandwidth come 2020 – and indeed the demands this will make on the energy sector, too.