Germany’s second-largest cable operator Unitymedia has recorded 80,000 new customers for its multimedia box Horizon in Q1 2015 – more than in any other quarter.
In total, 326,000 households in federal states North-Rhine Westphalia, Hessen and Baden-Württemberg now use the box which the subsidiary of US media company Liberty Global introduced in Germany in September 2013.
Demand also rises for high internet speeds: More than 60% of all new customers signed up for subscription packages with data rates of 120Mbps or more.
For its internet access service, Unitymedia reported 35,000 new contracts and for its telephony service 27,000 new contracts. The number of classic cable TV subscriptions dropped by 33,000.
In total, Unitymedia now has 2.9 million broadband and 2.8 million telephony customers.
Almost the whole Unitymedia cable network has been upgraded for an internet data rate of 200Mbps since November 2014. The service is now available to more than 12 million households.
Meanwhile, in Switzerland, internet and telephony have also been the main growth drivers at Liberty Global’s local subsidiary UPC Cablecom. Switzerland’s largest cable operator gained 10,500 new internet customers in Q1 2015. The broadband access service which offers a data rate of up to 250Mbps now has a total of 739,800 customers.
The number of telephony customers rose by 11,800 to 480,500. The mobile phone service which UPC Cablecom launched one year ago had 14,600 customers on March 31, 2015.
UPC Cablecom didn’t, however, manage to halt the decline of classic cable TV subscriptions: The number of TV customers went down by 1.2% to 1.37 million customers in Q1 2015.
