Mobile telephone group Orange has revealed 206,000 UK customers have signed up to the network in the last three months.

It now has 12.4m overall but the figure is down significantly on the 1.6m it took on in the same period to December 31 last year.

The majority of customers -- 8.6m -- are pre-pay, while 3.8m are on contracts.

But the proportion of contract connections increased during the past year, now accounting for 75 per cent of new customers.

Deputy chief executive Graham Howe said: "As mobile phone penetration grows towards 100 per cent of the addressable population, so our focus increasingly shifts to attracting higher-quality, new customers and building the loyalty, usage and average revenues of our existing customers."

But Mr Howe said many people upgraded from pre-pay to contracts, and there has also been a surge in text message use in the UK.

Mr Howe said 12 billion messages were delivered last year and Orange delivered about one third of those.