O2 Ireland adds 5,400 customers

O2 Ireland added 5,400 customers in the third quarter, bringing its total number of subscribers to 1.7 million at the end of September.

Service revenue for the three month period was €198 million, up from €193 million recorded in the second quarter of the year. However, year on year it was down from the €213 million recorded in the same period last year.

Data spending has continued to grow as a percentage of service revenue, with non-SMS revenues now accounting for 12.4 per cent of overall service revenues. The rise is being fuelled by what O2 referred to as “sustained growth” in mobile broadband customers, with the rising popularity of smartphones also making a contribution.

“We continue to see our customers using more data services, reflecting the growing importance of smartphones and mobile devices to access the internet on the move,” said O2 Ireland’s chief financial officer Paul Whelan.

“The resulting growth in data revenue is also encouraging against the backdrop of the very difficult economic climate which...continues to put downward pressures on ARPU (average reveue per user).”

Monthly average blended ARPU for the first nine months of 2010 fell from €39.67 to €37.14. Prepay customers spent an average of €24.32 per month, down from €25.16 in the same period a year earlier, and bill-pay customers saw a more significant decline from €63.03 to €55.33.

Vodafone's quarterly key performance indicators published on Tuesday revealed that the network had gained 31,700 customers up to the end of September, and its average blended monthly ARPU had fallen by 8.9 per cent to €35.40.