Ofcom Publishes Final UK vs EU Broadband Scorecard Results for 2014

The national telecoms regulator has today published the final version of their latest European Broadband Scorecard, which is designed to show how the United Kingdom compares with Europe’s other countries in terms of our progress towards the Government’s ambition that we should have the “fastest broadband of any major European country by 2015“.

As a reminder the Government originally said that they wanted us to have “the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015“. But in 2012 this was watered down (here) by the former Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, who instead said that he wanted the country to have the “fastest broadband of any major European country by 2015” (i.e. comparing us against France, Germany, Italy and Spain [EU5] rather than the whole of Europe).

Avid readers will note that Ofcom first published this report in December 2014 (here) and at the time we pointed to how a big chunk of its data appeared to be out of date (e.g. the statistics for broadband penetration, usage and take-up). At the time the regulator said they intended to issue an update in 2015 and today they’ve done exactly that (here).

Since this is just an update, and one that doesn’t change most of the results from our first report, then we’ll only post the latest score sheet because this reflects the relevant changes as a simple summary. The information related to broadband technology coverage, prices and service speeds is largely unchanged.

As a quick example of the differences, the UK score for “fixed broadband connections per 100 households” was 83 before Christmas and the update has now been adjusted to 82 (our EU5 ranking for this has thus gone from 1 to 2). All of the bottom rows starting “Percentage of individuals..” have also been updated.