UK operator EE said it had signed up 318,000 customers for its LTE network in the five months since its launch, meaning it is “firmly on track to meet [our] target of more than 1 million 4G customers by the end of 2013”.

It was not all good news for the company, however, which revealed that service revenue fell by 5.4 per cent in the first quarter of the year, to £1.42 billion. It said that excluding regulatory impact, service revenue would have decreased by 0.4 per cent, “following macroeconomic/competitive pressures”.

During the period, the company secured 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum to support its LTE rollout, paying £589 million in the UK licence auction – it said it owns 36 per cent of available UK mobile spectrum. It is currently using its 1.8GHz frequencies (also home to its 2G operation) for its 4G network.

The company said that contract net additions of 166,000 during the period marked “the best Q1 postpaid net adds performance since the creation of the company”, and 53 per cent of its customers are now on postpaid plans.

It noted that “in-line with industry shift toward postpaid and reflecting post-Christmas seasonality, prepaid customers decreased by 571,000”.

It ended the period with 25.74 million mobile customers, compared with 26.49 million at the end of Q1 2012, with a reduction in prepaid customers partially offset by growth in its contract user base.

Underlying blended mobile ARPU was up 2.2 percent quarter-on-quarter, but down 2.7 per cent year-on-year, at £18.20.

Some 82 per cent of the company’s postpaid customer base are now using smartphones, with 93 per cent of new and renewing connections being for these devices. Data revenue “continues to increase accordingly,” to account for 36 per cent of ARPU (up from 27 per cent in Q1 2012).

Neal Milsom, CFO of EE, said: “Today’s results are in-line with our expectations, and we are making good progress focusing on high value segments.”