U.K. Broadband Growth Slips 20%

For those of you looking for signs of how a possibly-significant recession will affect sales of consumer broadband, the United Kingdom might offer a glimpse of what can happen.

The growth rate for U.K. broadband access subscriptions fell 20 percent in the third quarter, say analysts at Point Topic. To keep pace with net additions earlier in the year, the United Kingdom needed to add 390,000 broadband lines in the third quarter. Point Topic estimates that the actual number was only 313,000.

Local loop unbundling is the main driver of continuing growth in broadband, and represented gross 323,000 lines added in the quarter. Point Topic estimates that Virgin Media may have added another 60,000 cable modem customers while BT and smaller players actually lost about 70,000 net subscribers.

As a result, Point Topic is now forecasting that only 620,000 broadband lines will be added in the second half of 2008. The forecast for 2009 as a whole is 1.1 million, 200,000 down on the earlier forecast. By the end of 2009 there should be about 18.4 million broadband lines in Britain, 300,000 short of what was expected six months ago.