Continued growth enjoyed by network operator O2

The second quarter of 2009 saw network operator O2, which is still quite new to the broadband market in the UK, add a further 52 398 subscribers to its customers base as it continues to grow at an impressive rate.

The high level of growth by the service provider O2 has also been shown by comparing the 267 090 broadband lines the provider announced back in November 2008 to the 456 882 lines that it had by the end of June 2009.

The customer numbers that have been announce by Telefonica, which is the parent company of O2, were believed to also include the numbers for another of its subsidiary companies, Be Broadband, which was one of the initial providers of the high-speed ADSL2+ Annex M technology that used shorter phone lines the provide its customers with upload speeds of as much as 2.5Mbps.

These latest figures are considered to be even more impressive by industry experts because of the huge levels of competition in the broadband marketplace, with an increasing number of providers now offering customers high-speed ADSL2+ services and cable providers like Virgin Media now offering uses connection speed of up to 50Mbps.

Connection speeds have, however, come under fire recently with the Ofcom speed report being criticised because, according to experts, it was misrepresenting the market by only using providers that could offer speed test result on up to 8Mbps services that were statistically significant with it tested 1600 locations.

It was suggested that ADSL2+ connections were roughly twice as fast as the regular up to 8Mbps standard ADSL broadband services currently on the market, according to the data obtained in the Ofcom speed tests. These results may have led a number of customers with short phone lines to move over to providers like Be broadband in order to get broadband speeds of 12Mbps or even higher.

Source – thinkbroadband