Broadband Access

A broadband divide between the North and South of the UK has been revealed in research results by Point Topic. Their findings show that 68 cities, towns and districts have high broadband penetration but only 3 on these are above the line drawn from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. It also showed that of the 60 places with low penetration, only 6 were south of that line.

The South East, South West, East of England and London regions have 32.9 broadband lines for every 100 residents but the other eight north and west regions have only 26.1. Many of the areas that suffer from low penetration are very rural with low populations and often far away from their nearest exchange. However, there is some positivity north of the border as Scotland has more exchanges per head compared to England, with many of them designed to serve smaller communities.

Overall, it is not all doom and gloom as 74% of the population live in areas considered to have medium penetration and only 8.8% are in areas where penetration is considered low or very low. There is clearly still a challenge to be faced to provide everybody with decent broadband levels, as promised in the Digital Britain report earlier in 2009. (ITPRO, November 2009)

The UK has taken a disappointing 25^th place in the latest global broadband study undertaken by MBA students from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics on behalf of Cisco. The country is considered to be meeting the needs of today with its broadband capability but it only held a mid-table spot behind Lithuania, Bulgaria and Latvia. Sweden came out top for the European contenders but came 4^th overall behind South Korea, who took the top spot ahead of Japan and Chinese territory Hong Kong.

Almost 2/3 thirds of countries were able to deliver good enough broadband for the most common web applications today, such as social networking, streaming low-definition video, web communications and sharing small files such as photos and music. However, only nine countries were prepared for future web applications such as high definition internet TV or high-quality video communications like home telepresence, which the report suggests will become mainstream in the next three to five years.

The research looked at 66 different countries' quality of connections and the percentage of households which have one. (ITPro, October 2009)

Real-life UK mobile broadband speeds reach, on average, only 24% of the headline data rates advertised by carriers as maximum available throughputs, according to a five-month research project by customer experience management specialist Epitiro.

At less than 1Mbps, the average mobile broadband speed is 34% slower than average speeds achieved on ADSL connections, the firm said.

The research was based on data taken from Epitiro's handset-based ‘Isposure' application, which was installed on more than 1,300 handsets across the UK, between the beginning of December 2008 and the beginning of May 2009. More than 1.4 million test results were recorded. (telecoms.com, June 2009)

Around 15% of UK homes (3 million households) have internet broadband access with speeds of less than 2 Megabits per second, the minimum speed the government envisaged for the whole country, according to research by the BBC. The research also revealed that many of these households are not located in rural areas, but in commuter belts.

In January, the government revealed it plans to ensure every UK household has access to 2Mbps broadband by 2012, in the initial findings of its Digital Britain report. Around 60% of UK homes have a broadband connection, while 99% have access to it. (IMRG, May 2009)