Third of Carphone lines unbundled

Nearly a third of Carphone Warehouse's broadband customers have their service delivered through unbundled lines, according to the company.

Carphone Warehouse, which took on AOL UK's customer base when it bought the company back in October 2006, now has some 2.2 million subscribers. Of these, 1.5 million were existing AOL customers, with the rest signed up to Carphone's TalkTalk packages.

Some 702,000 subscribers are now on unbundled lines, more than half of which are TalkTalk customers on fully unbundled lines. The rest are only partially unbundled lines.

Chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, Charles Dunstone, announced the figures yesterday. "We have made excellent progress both on the rate of customer migration to unbundled lines, and the roll-out of our network of unbundled exchanges... we have exceeded our initial target of unbundling 1,000 exchanges two months ahead of schedule," said Dunstone.

'Unbundling' an exchange is the process of installing equipment that will allow broadband and telephony services to be delivered to the local area without any reliance on BT's existing telephone network. The 1,024 exchanges that Carphone has unbundled give the company the potential to reach 70 per cent of households in the UK.

At the last count, there were some 1.7 million unbundled lines in the UK.

Carphone Warehouse was the first company to offer 'free' broadband last year, but the interest the deal generated caused problems, with more people signing up for the service than it could cope with.

Consequently, the company has fared badly in recent customer satisfaction surveys.

http://www.carphonewarehouse.com/

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