UK Falls One Place in 2015 EU Digital Agenda Broadband Progress Report

The European Commission has updated their EU Broadband Scorecard, which uses data from Dec 2014 and Jan 2015 to reveal the United Kingdom’s progress toward Europe’s overall Digital Agenda goals (e.g. ensuring 100% coverage of 30Mbps+ Internet speeds, with 50% take-up of 100Mbps+). But we’re now ranked 5th for connectivity, down one place from 4th last year.

The Digital Agenda goals actually cover much more than Internet connectivity, although being ISPreview.co.uk our focus is of course on the access side and in that sense it’s good to see that the overall UK coverage of Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband has increased from 82% last year to 89% now (compared with 68% across the EU). But we’re not so hot in rural areas.

However it should be stressed that the EU’s data doesn’t make clear whether their NGA coverage total reflects availability of superfast broadband (30Mbps+) speeds or just raw infrastructure inc. sub-30Mbps speeds. Indeed we’d put the actual coverage of 30Mbps+ at somewhere around 82-85% today (depending on the data source). Never the less the UK Government’s aim for 90% superfast broadband coverage by early 2016 still looks viable.

The EU’s report notes that Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands are the strongest for fixed line broadband connectivity, while Poland, Romania, Croatia and Italy were the weakest. However it also clearly states that NGA alone is “particularly advanced” in Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the UK and Belgium (as above). A general country summary for the UK can be found below.

The UK also does quite well for 4G (LTE) based Mobile Broadband coverage too, which is despite being later to market than many other operators in Europe (this deployment process is still on-going and should hit 98% by the end of 2015). But once again the rural gap is also quite noticeable (see chart below).

In relation to that it’s noted that the take-up of Mobile Broadband in the UK is currently running at 88 out of every 100 people, which is significantly above the EU average, although our rank for this indictor over last year did not change.

Overall the areas of connectivity where we lose points this year related to fixed line broadband take-up (down from 83% last year to 82% now) and service price, which means we’re ever so slightly more expensive than last year. Otherwise most areas reported an improvement, while others held steady and we’re still above the big boys of Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

Crucially most of the improvements delivered in the UK last year came as a direct result of the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK scheme, which in phase 1 has been dominated by BT based contracts to fuel the roll-out of their up to 40-80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology; with a little 330Mbps FTTP in places. Altnet providers (e.g. Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, B4RN etc.) and Virgin Media have also made some contributions, but at a much smaller level.

Going forward we’d expect the BDUK drive to show continued progress in next year’s report and alternative network operators will also be making a larger dent. Meanwhile Virgin Media’s plans to push their ultrafast capable cable network coverage out to 60% of the UK by 2020 will help, although a lot of that could be focused on urban areas where rival NGA solutions already exist.

EU Broadband Scorecard for the UK (2015)
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/scoreboard/united-kingdom#1-connectivity

EU Broadband Scorecard General Report (2015)
http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/dae/document.cfm?doc_id=9929