News 

The company has passed the four million mark for wholesale broadband customers. In other words, the service that ISPs resell to end-users.

According to BT, it has taken only four months to achieve the latest million ADSL connections and it is now adding an average of 8,500 customers a day. Ninety five per cent of UK homes and businesses should now be able to receive broadband services, which puts the company on track for reaching its 99.4 per cent target for summer 2005.

The new figures, claims BT, puts the UK ahead of any other G7 country in terms of DSL availability. This ignores, of course, the advanced connectivity of Scandinavian countries, which fall outside the G7 group.

'We are currently making a new broadband connection at least every ten seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,' said BT's CEO Ben Verwaayen. 'We reached three million ADSL connections in August of this year, so to have now reached four million well before Christmas is tremendous news. It shows that the take up rate for broadband is accelerating apace.'

In addition to ADSL, BT estimates that there are also 1.7 million cable broadband users in the UK.