Vodafone is losing hundreds of thousands of customers and is apparently planning to lay off thousands of employees. In the first quarter of the year alone, the company lost more than 200,000 customers.

More than at any time in five years, wrote the online trade magazine inside-digital.de. The company is said to have lost almost 120,000 cable Internet customers and another almost 90,000 DSL customers within a year. The number of TV customers is also expected to decline by more than 400,000 in the same period.