BT grew its slice of the broadband market by a net 258,000 extra
connections, taking 27% of the available market, according to BT's
results for the first half of the 2009 financial year.
"In the maturing broadband market, we remain the UK's number one
retail broadband provider with a customer base of 4.6 million," CEO
Ian Livingston said.
"We had a total of 13.3 million wholesale broadband connections
including 5.1 million local loop unbundled lines," he said.
Revenue from large corporate customers rose 15% to £2.1bn. This
was due to more sales of networked IT services, the favourable
impact of foreign exchange movements and recent acquisitions, BT
said. Among smaller and medium sized UK businesses, sales rose 3%
to £660m, due mainly to acquisitions, it said.
On the consumer side, sales dropped 4% to £1.24bn, but the
average revenue per household rose £5 to £283. This was due to more
customers buying "bundles" or multiple services, particularly
broadband, BT said.
Wholesale business, where BT rents bandwidth to third parties,
dropped 2% to £1.34bn. This was a slowdown from the decline of the
first quarter. But the increasing commoditisation of bandwidth has
led to an increase in low margin, high volume traffic, as well as
price cuts to DSL broadband and a net decline in revenue from
migrations to local loop unbundling arrangements. These were only
partly offset by strong growth in managed network solutions revenue
and growth in global carrier revenue, BT said.