This report on France kicks off a series of reports on Next Generation Access on the continent, also covering Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden, and concluding with a summary. Each country report is focused on the strategic rationale for NGA, and covers the incumbent's principal competitors, the IPTV opportunity, NGA plans or achievements, and the regulatory agenda. For France, our principal conclusion is that plans for NGA respond mainly to a strategic imperative to upgrade IPTV services to HD and multiple feed, with limited direct uplift to ARPU, making these plans generally cautious, tactical and highly focused on IPTV niche markets

UK broadband net additions in Q3 2008 fell sequentially, the first time this has happened in a third quarter. Q3 net adds almost halved year-on-year to 320,000

Carphone Warehouse’s distribution side was very strong in revenue terms in the September quarter, with an underlying (ex-currency) growth of 11%

The company is right to be cautious about the Christmas trading environment, although we believe that it will continue to do well in relative terms at least, and even has a fighting chance of hitting the distribution revenue guidance made back in April

Fixed line revenue growth was hit by churn and spin down at AOL UK, and churn in the non-broadband base. Fixed line EBITDA grew encouragingly as cost savings from LLU kicked in, but overall financial performance was marred by the cost of free laptop and retention offers at AOL UK

European mobile revenue growth has declined again, from 1.4% to 0.5%, despite favourable movements in regulatory factors, which imply an underlying drop in growth of about 2 percentage points

As announced in the October trading update, BT’s Q2 results were hit by poor cost control at Global Services. Performance elsewhere was reasonable but was shored up at group level by a spike in contribution from non-core business

Vodafone’s European organic service revenue growth dropped again in the September quarter, to -1.3%, and we estimate that it continues to underperform its competitors’ growth by two percentage points, thus losing market share. Margins also fell, as the company’s cost reduction measures continue to fail to stop costs rising

The UK business (EAUS) is continuing to improve ahead of guidance as expected and its turnround can now be judged a success. Management has announced an aggressive plan to extract synergy from the recently acquired Thus

Virgin Media’s Q3 results represent a significant step in the recovery of the business, with ARPU and consumer cable revenue stable for the first time in 18 months. Group OCF growth was hit by one-off opex reductions in the prior quarter but continues to grow on an underlying basis

This report examines recent developments in the UK residential market for broadband internet access. We consider the outlook over the next five years for total market volume and market shares

On 31st October BT announced that Q2 EBITDA and EPS will be slightly below expectations as a result of a sharp deterioration in performance at Global Services (GS) and that GS CEO Francois Barrault has been replaced by erstwhile Group Finance Director Hanif Lalani