Published:
27 April 2023
In the following section we highlight some of the key trends emerging this quarter from the data we collect on the UK telecommunications sector.
Fixed voice services
- UK fixed voice service revenues totalled £1.39bn in Q4 2022; a decrease of £28m (2.0%) from the previous quarter and £99m (6.6%) year-on-year. BT’s share of these revenues was 49.1%.
- The number of fixed exchange lines (including PSTN, ISDN and managed VoIP connections) fell by 751k (2.5%) during the quarter to 29.8 million. This decline is due to the growing availability and take-up of standalone broadband services.
- Total fixed-originated call volumes decreased by 176 million minutes (2.2%) during the quarter, to 7.6 billion minutes.
Fixed broadband services
- There were 28.0 million fixed broadband lines at the end of Q4 2022, an increase of 185k (0.7%) year-on-year.
- There were 19.7 million ‘other inc. FTTx’ broadband connections (predominantly fibre-to-the cabinet and full fibre connections) at the end of Q4 2022, accounting for 70.5% of all lines.
- The number of ADSL lines fell by 117k (4.0%) during the quarter, while the number of cable lines increased by 28k (0.5%) and the number of ‘other inc. FTTx’ lines increased by 175k (0.9%).
Mobile services
- Mobile telephony services generated £3.3bn in retail revenues in Q4 2022, a £161.1m (5.2%) increase from a year previously.
- Average monthly retail revenue per subscriber was £12.48 in Q4 2022, with post-pay subscribers generating more revenue than pre-pay users (averaging £15.01 compared to £5.28 for pre-pay).
- The number of active mobile subscriptions (excluding M2M) was 86.8 million at the end of Q4 2022, up 1.8 million (2.2%) from the year before.
- Over the same period, the number of dedicated mobile broadband subscriptions grew by 39k (0.7%) to 5.3 million.
- The number of mobile-originated voice call minutes decreased by 4.5 billion (9.6%) to 42.0 billion minutes year-on-year, with calls to landlines decreasing by 13.5% to 8.5 billion minutes.
- The number of mobile messages (including SMS and MMS) saw a year-on-year decline, down 1.7 billion messages (16.2%) to 8.8 billion.
Telecommunications data revenues, volumes and market share update Q4 2022 (PDF, 355.3 KB)