Broadband Delivery UK to Boost Uptake via Big Advertising Campaign

The Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme, which is working with BT and local councils in order to help make “superfast broadband” speeds of 24Mbps+ available to 95% of the population by 2017, is hoping to foster take-up of the new service by making consumers more aware of its existence.

At present it’s almost impossible to get any take-up figures for deployments of BT’s up to 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) or 330Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) connections under the BDUK project, which makes it difficult to judge progress or asses how much benefit might be derived from the claw-back mechanism.

The rules for claw-back seem to vary but many adopt a 20% take-up rule and once a local broadband project passes that mark then some of the subsidy can be “clawed back“, allowing it to be reinvested into further upgrades (though we’ve seen some projects suggest they’d use the money for general council investment). A piece on the FT (paywall) today suggests that if 50% take-up were ever achieved then that could be worth as much as £270 million.

But we’re unlikely to see adoption like that anytime soon and there are a number of reasons why this might be the case. Firstly, there’s awareness, with a recent study of 1,000 non-techy people by BDUK noting that 30% of superfast enabled households didn’t even know it was available and 50% of adults said they don’t know what it is. In fact we’ve also heard from some people who incorrectly thought they’d receive a speed boost without changing their existing service, which is usually wrong (unless you’re with Virgin Media of course).

On top of that most of the work so far has focused on delivering improvements to sub-urban areas or larger towns, where many people can often already receive reasonable connections using older ADSL2+ services (i.e. it’s harder to sell a 40-80Mbps product to somebody happy on 10-15Mbps ADSL2+, especially if they’re paying considerably less for it). By contrast those in slower rural areas can easily see the appeal, but they’re often last on the upgrade list and have a considerably smaller population density (less of an influence on the figures).

So it goes without saying that, despite some ISPs shouting about the benefits of so-called “fibre broadband” from every possible direction (e.g. BT), the Government still sees that many consumers appear not to be listening or even aware of what’s changed. As a result the Government is considering a major advertising campaign, which will go beyond the existing promotions that have tended to be aimed more at businesses.

A DCMS (BDUK) Spokesperson said:

“We know that some people aren’t aware superfast is available in their areas or what benefits it could have for their business or family life, so we are looking at ways to provide better information to them.”

ISPreview.co.uk notes from an earlier development that a tender for an advertising partner to take on this task has already gone out. But as we say, ISPs have already put a lot of effort into promoting related services and that’s had mixed success, although clearly BT has derived some benefit from its direct association with the roll-out programme (they single handily account for most of the new FTTC subscribers – details).

Apparently the Government’s approach will be to focus on the social benefits, such as for parents (i.e. showing how it can help children “study” for their homework) and the elderly (e.g. the use of video conferencing). Meanwhile TalkTalk has been quick to say that bringing the price of FTTC down would help to boost uptake, although ironically this might damage their own ability to sell ultrafast FTTP in the city of York. “The approach of ‘build it and they will come’ is not working because the price is too high,” said the budget conscious ISP.

The other problem here is that most people have already gotten use to a saturation of advertising and promotional material dropping through their mail, which has given rise to what we call the see-it-and-instantly-bin-it solution. In other words, anything that looks even a bit like marketing goes immediately to the bin, especially direct mailing promos from certain political parties. Suffice to say the Government are in for a tough time.