Tiscali 2003 Annual Report Download - page 25

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2626
Despite the migration of dial-up users to broadband, there was a steady flow of new dial-up customers, and so numbers remained
steady at around 7 million (as of 31 December). Internet traffic volumes posted strong growth: the number of online minutes jum-
ped by 9% in 2003 to 43.5 billion.
As stated earlier, Tiscali’s 7.8 million active users include 840,000 broadband customers; this is a huge increase from the
214,000 users registered at end-2002. This growth was due to an improvement in the regulatory situation (see section on the
broadband market), which opened up the market—albeit after some delay—and thus allowed the Group to compete effectively
with the former incumbent operators.
Broadband growth accelerated in the second half of the year, from about 12,000 new customers per week in the first quarter of
2003 to 20,000 per week in the last quarter. Growth in ADSL, which the Group offers in all 15 countries in which it operates,
gathered pace in the first quarter of 2004 too: at end-March the Group had a total of 1,240,000 ADSL users. This was mainly
achieved in the Netherlands, the UK, France, Italy and Germany.
By country, ADSL user numbers grew between end-2002 and end-2003 as follows:
• from 28,000 to 108,549, in Italy;
• from 49,000 to 200,000 in France;
• from 38,000 to 138,556 in Germany;
• from 13,000 to 112,000 in the UK, which saw the fastest growth;
• from 43,000 to 185,373 in the Benelux countries—growth accelerated in the Netherlands in the second half of the year,
which led to the launch of unbundled broadband in the country in August. In December, more than 40% of Dutch ADSL users
were transferred to the unbundled service.
360
465
602
840
0
100
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500
600
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900
Q1 03 Q2 03 Q3 03 Q4 03
000s
ADSL users