British Telecom, forced into a corner with its IPTV system, where it felt it could not compete with the UK’s hugely successful Freeview DVB-T TV service, is finally starting to build up customers in its hybrid DVB-T/IPTV BT Vision service.
Internal observers told us that that BT Vision would likely be scrapped if it did not achieve 200,000 customers by the year end, but having made it to 120,000, doubling customers in the last quarter of the calendar year, and having reached 150,000 since the end of the quarter, BT finally seems to have turned the corner with the service and it is now unlikely to face the chop.
In all the company’s broadband revenue grew by 25% last quarter and it added 177,000, retail customers taking it to 4.3 million broadband customers, but including wholesale connections BT has now moved to 12.2 million broadband lines, in a country where there are only 24 million homes (though not all of those will be domestic connections). There are now 3.7 million local loop unbundled lines, where BT only provides backhaul or phone exchange space for DSLAMs and a connection charge and the rest is taken care of by an unbundled broadband supplier.
In total BT added 2.2 million wholesale broadband connections over the year with 511,000 in the third quarter. BT Retail was still the leading broadband provider with 4.3 million at the end of the year.
BT has finally thrown away its Home Hub, which was one of the first which could allow connections to a cell phone over a local wireless connection and wi-fi around the home, and has replaced it with another design which offers to share a portion of wi-fi with people passing the home, in return for free wi-fi when traveling, called BT Fon
BT also said that it has new additional content deals with Paramount and Disney, but although executives referred to the deal where BT Vision can be delivered on a Microsoft Xbox instead of a set top, it didn’t say how many people had taken up the offer.