Research Round-up January 2025
- Veronica Speiser
- Feb 3
- 9 min read
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⭐ New This Month: Southampton (Hampshire) and Charnwood (Leicestershire) break into the top 10 FTTP premises passed in Q4 2024, driven by Toob and Glide’s expansion in Southampton and nexfibre’s growing footprint in Charnwood (Figure 1).
⭐ Why It Matters: Rising competition in full fibre pricing - Toob leads on affordability against VMO2 in Southampton, while ISPs in Charnwood can leverage nexfibre’s expanding network to undercut rivals.
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Key publication of the month:
Summary and key points
In Q3 2024, global fixed broadband connections reached 1.84 billion, as we recorded a healthy quarterly growth of 1.39%. Broadband subscriptions declined in 13 countries, down from 18 in Q2 2024. Some of these markets have high mobile subscriber penetration, while others are experiencing economic headwinds or are already highly saturated markets, for example, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Others are still in the midst of conflict (Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan).
The highest growth in Q3 2024 came from the developing and least saturated markets.
India was at the top of the largest 20 fixed broadband markets with a 4.91% growth rate q-o-q.
The share of FTTH/B in the total fixed broadband subscriptions increased further and stood at 71.35% (Figure 1). Broadband connections based on other technologies saw their market shares shrink again, except for satellite and fixed wireless.
Figure 1. Quarterly growth in fibre broadband subscribers around the world. Source: Point Topic. Year-on-year, FTTH/B connections grew by 8%. Satellite and FWA saw annual growth as well (+36.4% and +10.5% respectively), with the former mainly driven by Starlink (Figure 2).
Among the largest twenty markets, all saw fixed broadband subscriber growth in Q3 2024. The average growth in the 20 markets was 1.12%, compared to 0.93% in Q2 2024.
The highest FTTH/B broadband subscriber growth rates in markets with at least 0.5m fibre connections were in Greece, Peru and Algeria.
In the context of limited public availability of the official Starlink subscriber data, our estimates are based on the service launch dates and countries’ demographic and other characteristics. Our total estimated Q3 2024 figure for Starlink subscribers in the countries where we cover the operator is 3.2 million, up from 2.7 million in Q2 2024.
Read the complete article in our free analysis here.
Key January telecoms sector news
BT Group News
7 January – According to Openreach’s annual update, broadband traffic across the UK increased by 10.5% in 2024 to 103,590 Petabytes (PB) of data.
17 January – Openreach announced GEN005/25 Notification of Tranche 15, 63 FTTP priority exchanges, stop sell implementation 17 February 2025; and GEN006/25 notifying CPs about the minimum 12 months’ notification of product stop sell to be activated in the Tranche 19 FTTP priority exchange locations bringing the total of notified exchanges to 1338 including the Salisbury trial site.
22 January – Openreach reported that it’s full fibre roll-out has covered half of Scotland’s premises. It’s invested more than £435m on full fibre links for Scotland so far, with 1.45m properties covered with take-up at 38%, ahead of the UK average.
23 January – Openreach announced NGA001/25 Legacy FTTC 40/2 speed tier stop sell; the FTTC: 40/2 speed tier will be withdrawn from new supply from 24/04/2025. This speed tier has been superseded by faster variants offered at the same or lower price. Existing circuits will be unaffected.
24 January – BT urged UK’s Critical National Infrastructure providers to move off outdated copper network this year as fault rate increases. BT data revealed that 60% of CNI customers in the UK currently have no plan in place to start migrating off the legacy analogue network.
30 January – BT Group published its Q4 2024 results, Openreach:
Passed over 1m premises for the fourth consecutive quarter, bringing its FTTP footprint to 17m premises (more than half of the UK), with 4.3m premises being in hard-to-reach and rural areas.
Connected nearly half a million customers in the quarter, with total premises connected reaching 6m. In 2024, it averaged around 68k FTTP orders per week.
Openreach broadband ARPU grew by 6% y-o-y to £16.1.
Retail FTTP base grew by 33% y-o-y to 3.2m of which Consumer 3.0m and Business 0.2m, but Consumer broadband ARPU was down 1.2% y-o-y to £40.6.
Consumer customer base is relatively stable with the broadband base down 40k q-o-q (0.5% decline); with Business revenues remaining stable in its core UK channels.
30 January – BT Group announced that Jon James, current CEO of Danish provider Nuuday, has been appointed CEO of BT Business, as it becomes focused on the UK, and a member of its Executive Committee. He will start in his new role on 3 March 2025.
Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) News
7 January – O2 announced a significant upgrade to its mobile network in Nottingham, after completing work to boost signal and services in over 1500 postcodes since the beginning of the year.
13 January – O2 to start UK 3G mobile switch off in City of Durham in April 2025.
15 January – VMO2 announced it had passed 9,000 premises in Bath (Somerset) with its 2 Gbps-capable full fibre network on behalf of nexfibre.
20 January – Virgin Media Business started offering higher bandwidth Ethernet products via its new Converged Interconnect Network (CIN).
22 January – VMO2 announced it had passed 8,000 additional premises in Northallerton (North Yorkshire) with its 2 Gbps-capable full fibre network on behalf of nexfibre.
CityFibre (CF) News
20 January – CF announced that it has begun work in all nine of its Project Gigabit areas. In total, over 1.3m premises across rural or hard-to-reach areas will be covered over the next five years.
CityFibre’s Project Gigabit rollout was made possible by the award of £782m of Government subsidies awarded to the supplier.
22 January – CF is the latest operator to adopt EXFO’s Exchange solution which will improve its ability to field-test its full-fibre network leading to further efficiencies and engineering cost reductions.
Independent Operators (Altnets) News
2 January – Glide announced the completion of a refinancing of its existing debt arrangements and the deal also included a new capex facility to support growth. Its annual report (up to Jan 2024). noted how their revenues had grown by 15% in the year to £27.9m, “with growth in all areas of the business” with gross profit increasing from £15.4m to £17.3m. Glide gained 12k new student beds this year, bringing their student customer base to 250k. It also added 7k new business premises to their coverage and invested over £20.9m into their network.
7 January – Ogi completed work on a multimillion-pound programme to connect Cardiff’s city centre economic gateway to its 10 Gigabit-capable high-capacity full fibre network.
9 January – nexfibre announced it has reached a total of 2m premises passed and ready for service.
14 January – nexfibre published its latest regulatory report, ‘UK Fibre: A Fork in the Road.’ Noting that, it comes at a critical time for the UK fibre market, ahead of Ofcom’s Telecoms Access Review (TAR). The decisions made in this review will have far-reaching consequences for the future of the UK’s digital infrastructure, economy and society.
20 January – Netomnia published its Q4 2024 results, noting that it had passed an additional 255k premises during the quarter bringing its total to 2.08m serviceable and 238k connections with a take-up rate of 11.5%.
21 January – GoFibre announced that it completed its build to 6,000 premises in the Scottish Borders town of Hawick, and had already signed up 1,000 customers.
24 January – toob, which has deployed FTTP networks to parts of South England and also utilizes some of CityFibre’s network, has placed 4th in the latest 2025 Sunday Times 100 Tech – a ranking of Britain’s fastest-growing private technology companies.
24 January – Wholesale and Ethernet network-focused, ITS Technology Group, launched its 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps symmetrical speed tiers via its FibreLight Ethernet over FTTP )EoFTTP service.
26 January – Hyperoptic has informed employees that 2025 will see a “reduced volume of work” and a possible reduction in its infrastructure teams with a possible 130 roles being cut.
27 January – FullFibre and Zzoomm announced merger to form one of the UK’s largest Altnets with 600k ready-to-serve properties and over 65k customers.
29 January – Global Connectivity plc (GCON) pumps an extra £6.2m into Voneus which aims to cover 370k premises via its FWA and FTTP networks.
31 January – Quickline announced it had connected the first homes under its £73.5m state-aid supported Project Gigabit roll-out contract for North Yorkshire (Lot 31), which will extend its FTTP coverage to an additional 36,300 premises in some of the hardest-to-reach areas of the county.
Other News
3 January – Starlink’s 2024 Progress Report noted that its future V3 Starlink satellite will have 1 Tbps of downlink speeds and 160 Gbps of uplink capacity, which is more than 10x the downlink and 24x the uplink capacity of the V2 Mini Starlink satellites.
7 January – DSIT announced that Openreach had been awarded £289m in Project Gigabit contracts to connect some of Britain’s most remote locations including in the Dee Valley, Isle of Anglesey and Shropshire Hills and cover approximately 131k premises.
10 January – The Swansea Bay City Deal’s Digital Infrastructure Programme has launched a new Prior Information Notice (PIN), which is seeking feedback from suppliers that might be interested in helping to provide “affordable” gigabit broadband to poorly served premises in the Swansea Bay City Region (Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire, Swansea, and Neath Port Talbot).
10 January – TOTSCo published its 21 days’ consultation proposed changes to its User Agreement and MAP Agreement to enable it to adapt those contracts to the requirements of business switching.
15 January – The Data Communications Company which manages the country’s smart metres network, in partnership with Vodafone began their first live customer trials that will see existing Smart Meters in UK homes being upgraded to use Toshiba’s new 4G Communication Hub.
15 January – The London Internet Exchange (LINX), a not-for-profit organisation which handles a large proportion of UK and global data traffic through their switches via around 900 members (broadband ISPs, mobile operators etc.), has updated its pricing structure for 2025 to deliver more value and flexibility for their global member base.
The new pricing structure for port and service fees follows member feedback and an analysis of the wider interconnection market and has resulted in port price cuts, more flexible and fractional peering services being added as well as increased value to the £100 per month membership fee benefits.
15 January – FTTH Council Europe summarises copper switch-off progress by country.
15 January – Dorset County Council announced that after 11 years and £23.6m its superfast and ultrafast rollout programmes have connected over 85k premises. This marks the end of its superfast and ultrafast rollouts, which has also seen an additional £5.3m returned to the county as part of a 'cash back' deal with Openreach.
17 January – Ofcom’s new rules come into effect that enforce telecoms providers must now set out upfront, in pounds and pence, any price rises that will apply to customer contracts, under new rules any price rise written into a customer’s contract will need to be set out in pounds and pence, prominently and transparently, at the point of sale; and providers will need to be clear about when any changes to prices will occur.
23 January – FarrPoint Digital Connectivity Survey 2025 finds that UK councils prioritise expanding gigabit-capable broadband coverage, followed by ensuring 100% of premises have superfast connectivity, followed by more 4G and 5G coverage, but only 4% of the councils surveyed are developing a dedicated data centre strategy.
23 January – ISPreview has spotted that the Scottish Government (SG) yesterday published a contract notice for the Fife, Perth and Kinross (Lot 4 – Scotland) area under the UK’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband roll-out scheme, which is expected to expand full-fibre (FTTP) connectivity to an estimated 28,441 premises in hard-to-reach (rural) locations.
28 January – The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has today published the “provisional findings” of their investigation into the UK’s public cloud infrastructure services market, which is currently dominated by Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure). The probe found that “competition is not working as well as it could” and is now shifting its focus to look at remedies.
29 January – The Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) has today appointed Neos Networks to lead their £1.2m D2N2 Gigahubs project, which will work alongside Openreach (BT) and Netomnia to deploy a new full-fibre gigabit broadband network to connect “up to” 28 public buildings (schools, NHS sites etc.) across rural parts of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
29 January – Vodafone UK claimed to have “beaten Elon Musk in the space race” by making the first mobile-to-mobile video call using a normal (unmodified) Smartphone and special satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) from partner AST SpaceMobile. This is essentially a space-based 4G and 5G mobile broadband service.
30 January – BDUK published the outcome of Project Gigabit National Rolling Open Market Review September 2024.
31 January –Ofcom, has called on major ISPs – including BT, Sky Broadband, Vodafone, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media – to provide more information to help them understand why the new consumer broadband and phone switching system (One Touch Switching) is still struggling to complete many consumer migration requests.
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