Broadband News

Carphone Warehouse/TalkTalk has confirmed reports that uptake of its broadband service has slowed during the last quarter, but said that its network roll out is progressing well.

Figures released by the firm in its quarterly trading reports showed that it added 89,000 new broadband subscribers during the second quarter, bringing its total subscriber base to 2.5 million.

A report in the Times last week predicted that the figure for new subscribers would stand at around 95,000.

Nonetheless, this level of uptake represents a significant downturn from the 126,000 new customers it garnered during the previous quarterly period.

Roll out of the firm’s network appears to be on schedule, however, with 137 TalkTalk exchanges being unbundled during the period as well as 363 AOL exchanges. This, coupled with the connection of 411,000 customers to the firm’s own network, brings the ISP’s on-net customer total to 1.4 million.

Charles Dunstone, Chief Executive Officer, said: "I am very pleased with the progress we have made in our fixed line business, with visibility of future profitable growth increasing all the time.

"We now have over one million TalkTalk broadband customers, while the focus in AOL has been on customer migrations and network roll-out. As a result, over 80 per cent of all new broadband customers are now connected directly to our own network.

"We are well ahead of schedule for migrating existing customers to our own network; we have the most extensive unbundled coverage in the UK; and customer service unit costs are falling as our processes improve."