Fixed and other services
Fixed line revenue
£1,874m
(2007: £1,580m, 2006: £1,391m)
Fixed services
During the 2008 financial year, Vodafone pursued the development of fixed broadband services in many of the Group’s markets, in order to provide customers with data and fixed voice solutions to meet their total communications needs, mainly through Digital Subscriber Line (“DSL”) technology. As a result, fixed broadband active lines have increased to 3.6 million at 31 March 2008, up from 2.1 million active lines one year earlier.
In December 2007, Vodafone completed the acquisition of Tele2 in Italy and Spain (“Tele2”), which had almost 800,000 fixed broadband customers. Vodafone branded consumer fixed broadband offers were also launched in Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, New Zealand and Egypt during the 2008 financial year.
Business fixed broadband offers have been recently launched in the Czech Republic and in Italy, while a fixed broadband WiMax offer was launched in Malta.
Other services
Mobile advertising
Over one billion advert impressions
in the year to 31 March 2008
The Group has been extending its business model to generate revenue from mobile advertising by partnering with advertising specialists in individual markets. Vodafone introduced mobile advertising in nine markets and the core capabilities continue to be developed, such as WAP banners and messaging formats, as well as more sophisticated targeting offers.
A critical area of activity required to grow the market is the development of common standards that can be adopted by all market participants. Vodafone is taking a leading role in this activity, which has achieved its first results:
- Banners for WAP display formats have been defined by the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA);
- Messaging format definition activity has recently commenced; and
- Agreement was reached in the UK between Vodafone, O2, Orange, T-mobile and Hutchison to progress an inter-operator standard for mobile advertising in the 2008 calendar year.
Business managed services
As part of the total communications strategy, Vodafone is offering our business customers solutions which meet a wider variety of their communications needs, and also developing new ways of enabling them to mobilise and increase the efficiency of their workforce. Vodafone is at the forefront of the market in a number of these solutions, including:
- secure remote access – a service enabling customer employees to access their network through their laptop, on the move, both while in their home country and when roaming; and
- applications – many software programs have been developed for use on mobile devices and Vodafone can integrate these into the customer’s mobile portfolio. These applications can satisfy many needs, such as:
- enabling a workforce to have up to date sales information fully aligned across the business and available at any time, anywhere; and
- providing workforce scheduling to mobile employees which can be updated centrally and in real time, ensuring the customer can satisfy all their own customer needs quickly and efficiently.
These solutions open up a new revenue stream for Vodafone by providing an end to end solution, integrating these into the customer’s infrastructure and subsequently managing the service.