UK home and small business broadband lines hit 19.5m in Q4
The figure represents a year-on-year rise of 3.9 per cent.
The number of active home and small business broadband lines in the UK increased by more than 700,000 in the final quarter of 2010, Ofcom's latest figures have shown.According to the regulator's new Telecommunications Market Data Tables, there were 19.5 million non-corporate broadband (NCB) connections at the end of the three-month period.
This figure was 3.9 per cent higher than in the corresponding quarter of 2009, representing a total increase of 728,000 lines.
BT continued to dominate the NCB sector, the study found, with the telecoms giant holding a market share of 27.7 per cent - up 1.7 percentage points year on year.
The company's own figures for the quarter show it took 53 per cent of all new DSL broadband customers between October and December, adding 188,000 lines over the three months.
At the time, BT chief executive Ian Livingston said: "These results show that we are making progress on a number of fronts. There is always more to do but our performance underpins our outlook for this year and the period to 2012-13."
While BT had 5.4 million NCB lines at the end of last year, rival DSL providers had a total of 2.5 million. Other platforms, including LLU, had a combined 7.5 million connections, while cable company Virgin Media had just over four million.
However, the growth in the broadband market was not replicated by the telephony sector.
Ofcom's report found BT's share of fixed-line voice revenues declined by 2.3 percentage points to 51.2 per cent. The telecoms market generated overall returns of £2.3 billion in the fourth quarter, a year-on-year decrease of 5.5 per cent.
The regulator attributed these falls to a 0.6 per cent slump in the number of fixed lines to 33.3 million, combined with a drop in call volumes of 5.2 per cent to 31.5 billion minutes.
