2007 was the year of unbundling in the UK. The number of local-loop unbundled (LLU) lines almost trebled from 1.3 million to 3.7 million.

The great majority of customers enabled for LLU are now on unbundled lines. Better still, LLU users are far better pleased with the service they are getting than they were a year ago.

LLU will never see such a rapid advance again. The early reports from BT Openreach suggest that the first quarter of 2008 was also quite strong for LLU, with over 560,000 lines added. But future quarters are likely to show a declining trend.

The market for LLU is in sight of saturation, and adds will do well to reach 400,000 per quarter in future. We estimate that Sky, Orange and Carphone Warehouse’s TalkTalk brand now have virtually all the customers within their LLU footprint on unbundled lines. Only Carphone’s AOL and Tiscali have significant numbers of customers still to migrate.

Most future LLU growth will have to come from extending the footprint, bringing in new customers and winning more market share.  

 Reproduced from the LLU Tracker reports with the kind permission of Point Topic