More than 64,000 customers have hung up on global telecommunications giant Vodafone plc’s Australian mobile arm as it battles to overcome perceptions of a poor network.

The big fall-off in customers who have left since January 1 pushed the number in Australia down to 3.3 million at March 31, 2012.

Vodafone plc is a 50:50 partner with Hutchison Telecommunications Australia (HTA) in the Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) joint venture, which operates the Vodafone and “Three” mobile brands in Australia.

Vodafone customer numbers represented its 50 per cent equity interest in the joint-venture, the telco said in its full year fiscal 2012 results released on Tuesday (UK time).

Therefore, even accounting for the different way Vodafone plc and VHA measure customer numbers, the result suggests the joint-venture company lost somewhere in the vicinity of 120,000 customers in the first three months of calendar 2012.

HTA’s full year financial accounts, released in February, showed the joint-venture had 7.022 million mobile customers at December 31, 2011.

Vodafone plc said service revenue in Australia fell 8.8 per cent in the 12 months to March 31, 2012.

This was despite improvements in network and customer operations performance, the company said.

“In Australia, revenue declined sharply as our network perception continued to suffer after service issues experienced more than a year ago,” Vodafone plc said.

The “brand recovery was still not evident”, Vodafone plc said in a slide presentation accompanying the full year results.

Only Vodafone plc’s Spain and Greece units posted larger service revenue declines, it said.