This article is more than 1 year old

TalkTalk boasts of fourplay-loving customers, extreme growth

Results prove it can walk the walk after all

While the battle lines are being drawn up between BT-EE and Vodafone over selling you great big lumps of TV, broadband, fixed and mobile phones, TalkTalk has been in the quadplay game for ages.

The telco, which was spun out of Carphone Warehouse in 2010, has announced its last quarter (third quarter, full year 2015) figures, and revealed the value of bundling.

Sales of SIM-only contracts which are tied to the other services, but which don’t come with a handset, accounted for up to 11 per cent of the SIM-only market when the offering was launched in December.

"We're excited about the future of quad-play," said said Dido Harding, CE, TalkTalk. "We have the largest unbundled network in the UK, a new long-term mobile access agreement, and one of the broadest ranges of film and TV content, all of which is underpinned by a pro-competition regulatory environment."

Having taken on the Tesco broadband customers when it bought Blinkbox, TalkTalk in total added 15,000 broadband, 50,000 mobile, 88,000 fibre and 115,000 TV customers in the quarter, in part thanks to its lowest churn in three years of 1.3 per cent.

One interesting development is TalkTalk’s Our Fibre-To-The-Premises trial in York, which while not up and running yet has laid the first microtrenched fibre runs.

"We remain on track to connect the first customers onto the network later this year, and are excited about the longer-term roll-out prospects," said a TalkTalk representative.

"Today's results demonstrate the strong and growing demand for our products, as we saw our strongest ever quarter of TV, mobile and fibre adds," added Harding.

So it’s all looking good on the money side with total revenue for the quarter up 4.2 per cent, year on year, to £449m.

The results talk of the company's “in-home 4G spectrum” and four million points of presence, and claims that “this will support our strategy to build a small cell mobile network in the medium term”.

The idea is a good one, namely to use the DECT guard band spectrum TalkTalk has with Femtocells in customers’ homes to build a mobile phone network, although this is politically challenging as it will need the co-operation of rivals.

With such strong figures, a proven quad-play track record and big ambitions, the forthcoming spectrum auctions might look attractive. Watch this space. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like