BDUK Publish Data on Premises Passed for sub-24Mbps Broadband

At the end of last year the Government announced that their Broadband Delivery UK project with BT had so far managed to expand the availability of superfast broadband (24Mbps+) capable lines to 3.5 million premises (here), but we now know that this figure is closer to 4 million when you include sub-24Mbps premises.

The BDUK programme has tended to only release data on the coverage of “superfast” (24Mbps+) broadband speeds, which reflects their aim of making the same performance available to 90% of the UK by around spring 2016 and 95% by 2017/18.

However the current BT dominated and state aid supported roll-out of ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable FTTC “fibre broadband” technology is also expanding its reach into more areas than those reflected in BDUK’s official statistics, which represent locations that receive slower speeds than the required 24Mbps (they need faster than this in order to be officially deemed “superfast“).

This is because FTTC lines can deliver anything from around 2Mbps to 80Mbps and so some premises will still get a benefit, even if they can’t officially be classified as “superfast“. Unfortunately BDUK’s performance reports have tended to exclude this additional data, perhaps to avoid confusing people, and we’ve rarely had much luck when requesting it.

Thankfully one of our readers has succeeded in extracting the information via a Freedom of Information (FoI) request, which reveals that an additional 425,000 premises have been subtracted from the official results due to delivering sub-24Mbps performance.

DCMS Statement (21st January 2016)

Based on data received from the suppliers, an additional 425,000 premises (excluding Wales and Herefordshire & Gloucestershire) may have benefitted from a speed uplift as a result of upgrades under the Superfast Broadband Programme but were excluded from the reported numbers because they would not have had access to speeds above 24Mbit/s. We do not have any data on the number within the 425,000 which would have speeds above or below 2Mbps.

We could perhaps surmise that the premises passed figure for sub-24Mbps areas is closer to 500K, at least it probably is once you factor in the missing data from Wales, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire (they haven’t yet reported an updated total). No FTTP lines are likely to be covered by this figure (FTTP doesn’t suffer from the same copper speed limits as FTTC), so we haven’t considered those and in any case only a little FTTP has been deployed via BDUK.

Interestingly BDUK were also asked to identify which of those +/- 500K premises passed could not receive a 2Mbps service, although no data was provided and we suspect that this may be partly because BT generally doesn’t like to supply FTTC at speeds below 2Mbps (according to Issue 12 of the last WBC FTTC Handbook update that we saw).

3.3.6 Pre requisites for taking WBC FTTC End User Access services.

Before processing WBC FTTC End User access, a CP must be a WBC customer with the entire associated WBC infrastructure in place.

The minimum predicted downstream speed of any line under consideration for FTTC is 2Mb/s. Although this is a minimum, a customer should consider whether a line predicting marginally over 2Mb/s would perform adequately in service.

At this speed it’s also possible that in some cases a pure copper ADSL2+ line might actually deliver faster speeds than the FTTC connection, although experiences do vary (depending upon the local network design). In any case we hope readers find this extra bit of information from DCMS/BDUK useful and hopefully we can get a more regional breakdown in the future.