TalkTalk to make first foray into mobile contracts

TalkTalk will begin offering mobile contracts in the coming year, as well as improving its network backhaul over the next five years.

The telecoms company, which currently only offers pay-as-you-go mobile packages, revealed the plans during its full fiscal 2012 financial statement on Thursday.

"Our mobile base continues to grow with over 70,000 customers now taking mobile in addition to their phone and broadband service," TalkTalk said in a statement. "We plan to launch a handset proposition later this year in addition to our existing SIM-only and data products."

The company also said it would increase its fixed-line broadband network capacity by more than 100 times over the course of the next five years, but told ZDNet UK it could not divulge more details about the plans at this stage.

"Over the next five years, we plan to increase our network capacity by over 100 times. Primarily this will take the form of cost efficient backhaul scaling against a sustainable exchange footprint," TalkTalk said. "In addition we will continue to optimise our network for video content, security and access to cloud services."

TalkTalk improved its financial standing over the year, increasing profit before tax from £57m in fiscal 2011 to £127m in fiscal 2012. However, despite this increase, its overall revenues were down around 4.5 percent year on year as a result of a decline in overall subscriber numbers. 

However, the customers that TalkTalk added during the year were on its own network, rather than on BT's IP Stream technology, leading to the rise in profits despite the decline in revenues. TalkTalk signed up 100,000 more of these "fully unbundled" customers in fiscal 2012.