Carphone Warehouse Group gave mixed signals today as mobile phone contract sales impressed, but fewer people were connected to its broadband offering than analysts had expected.
Europe's biggest mobile phone retailer said it was on track to meet analysts' full-year forecasts and had connected 540,000 users to its Talktalk UK broadband offering by the end of the third quarter, of which 132,000 were on its own "unbundled" lines.
The firm is expected to make a pretax profit of £119 million sterling on average, according to a poll of 11 analysts.
Finance director Roger Taylor said the number of people connected to its broadband service was lower than experts had expected but that
the firm was concentrating on getting users onto its own unbundled lines and expected to have 700,000 users up and running by March.
Unbundling is the process by which telecoms firms put their own equipment into BT's exchanges to replicate the work done by BT's lines, which connect households to the wider network.
Until Carphone runs broadband on its own equipment, it continues to make a loss on each customer as it is forced to provide them with BT wholesale broadband.