Thanks to its exclusive rights to the Apple iPhone, O2 — the mobile arm of Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica — today claimed to be the only UK network to have grown revenues in the last three months.

Rivals have now been given access to the iPhone but Vodafone, for one, will not start distributing it until after Christmas. And O2 believes it has taken a clear lead in the market.

“We have etablished O2 as the home of the smart phone,” said chief executive Matthew Key. “And we are now seeing firm evidence of mobile data taking off with more than five million of our UK customers regularly accessing the internet on their phones and a 20-fold increase in data traffic on our network over the last year.”

Key also said O2 now has the lowest level of customers switching networks of any UK operator which he attributes to its “Simplicity” range of contracts and deals.

In the last year O2 has seen a major improvement in its German business which largely drove a 4.6% rise in operating income across the whole European group in the past nine months to 2.9 billion (£2.6 billion).