BT Broadband 4M Milestone

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BT | Press Release | September 3, 2007
Four million and counting - BT Retail passes broadband milestone

BT Retail today became the UK’s first broadband supplier to pass the four million customer mark. The achievement cements BT’s position as the UK’s most popular supplier of broadband and follows the fifth consecutive independent survey to identify BT as having the UK’s best performing ADSL broadband service 1.

BT Retail had 172,000 broadband customers in June 2002 when BT put broadband at the heart of its strategy. The acceleration to four million has taken just over five years meaning a new customer has been added on average every 40 seconds over this period. This also equates to more than 2,000 new customers each day during that period. The last million customers have been added in ten months.

The broadband market has boomed in recent years thanks to BT’s investment in making the service available to almost every home in the UK. More than 99.8 per cent of UK homes can access broadband and more than half of these homes have now taken up the service.

This dramatic rise in connections has led to the UK overtaking most of its main competitors in terms of broadband penetration. Only Canada is ahead of the UK in the G8 meaning the UK is ahead of Japan, France, Germany and the US 2. There are more than 15 million connections in the UK with approximately 11.5m of those running over the BT network. The rest are carried via the UK’s cable network.

BT Retail chief executive Ian Livingston said: “Four million customers is a great achievement in such a short time. Broadband has proved to be one of the most popular new services ever seen. It is already delivering next generation television, inclusive free phone calls in High Definition sound and great value mobile calls. Broadband can provide so many more services than just internet surfing and it has become central to many people’s lives and businesses. Customers want to take advantage of the potential of broadband and need a high quality, reliable service – that’s why BT is the UK’s most popular broadband service.”



1EPITIRO survey dated July 16, 2007
2 CRTC Communications Monitoring Report July 2007

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zdnet.co.uk
Reuters | BT surpasses four million broadband customers | Published: 03 Sep 2007 14:29 BST