Newsflash: Free broadband sells

Carphone Warehouse released its annual results today (I wonder if there was any psychological warfare planning involved in the selection of the date 6/6/6?), and prominently featured early on in the release is the revelation that as of yesterday, 340k people had signed up for its TalkTalk "free broadband" proposition since launch on 11th April. To put this in perspective, that's nearly 6,200 per day since launch, and probably puts the company in a de facto fifth place in UK DSL from a virtual standing start. Of particular interest to me is the fact that only a little over half of these newcomers are from the existing CPS customer base, and a further 10% are from the existing DSL base. In other words it looks like over a third of new TalkTalk broadband customers are complete newcomers to the company. As I pointed out here, there are numerous execution challenges, but the company also has a brand to kill for in the UK, and these early indications of demand seem to bear that out.