Digi bleeds 1 in 6 customers even as it rockets past 10 million lines
Spain’s cheapest operator just smashed another growth record—ten months after it thought it had peaked. DIGI closed 2025 with 10.8 million active lines, 994 thousand of them poached from rivals in a single year. The catch: for every new SIM it welcomed, one existing customer walked. Churn hit 15.8 %, the worst tally in the Spanish market and a 25 % spike in just twelve months.
The pricing trap that keeps snapping shut
What lures Spaniards to DIGI is brutally simple: €20 for 300 Mbps fibre plus a 30 GB mobile plan. No bundles, no permanence, no fine print. Yet that same simplicity erodes loyalty the moment a competitor undercuts by fifty cents or a dropped call interrupts a Zoom call. Internal documents shown to investors reveal the bleeding is fastest on DIGI’s own fledgling network—churn there leapt from 9.6 % in late 2021 to 14.3 % at the end of 2025. Customers still riding on Telefónica’s grid cancel even faster, at 23.3 %, despite paying up to €10 extra for the privilege.
The Romanian-owned carrier has spent north of €1 billion trenching fibre across the peninsula to escape that dependency. The bet was that owning the pipes would glue users in place. Instead, the construction frenzy coincided with customer-service black holes: technicians miss appointments, street cabinets overheat, rural antennas tilt the wrong way. Complaints on X pile up faster than DIGI’s social team can mute the hashtags.
Vodafone in the crosshairs, but for how long?
DIGI’s net-add streak puts it 1.2 million subscribers shy of Vodafone Spain’s third spot. At the current pace it could overtake the British group before the summer. Wall Street analysts cheer the headline, yet privately warn that climbing churn nullifies scale: acquiring a mobile user costs DIGI roughly €45, but the average lifetime value is shrinking faster than ARPU, which already languishes below €10. Each promotional burst, therefore, erodes rather than builds margin.
Management insists the pain is transitional. “We are migrating customers to our own infrastructure; service quality will stabilise,” a spokesperson told TechBloom, blaming December’s 14-hour voice outage on “isolated external plant incidents.” Engineers on the ground describe a different picture: software patches rushed without field testing, passive optical splitters mislabelled, and a ticketing system that times out complaints after 48 hours.
The streaming add-on meant to sweeten the deal—DIGI TV—offers 80 free channels via the TDT app but lacks LaLiga rights and original content. Subscribers open the app an average of 1.3 times per month, according to usage data leaked by a former product manager. Compare that to Movistar Plus+’s 28 sessions and the stickiness gap becomes visible.
For now, the growth engine still runs on pure price. Yet in Spanish telecom, history shows that the cheapest seat flips first when the economy sneezes. If churn edges past 20 %—a threshold DIGI could hit this very quarter—the operator risks entering a death spiral where every new line sold deepens the cash burn. The 10-million mark may therefore be remembered not as a milestone, but as the moment DIGI’s discount miracle started eating itself alive.