The UK BT and BDUK “Fibre Broadband” Uptake Figures for Q3 2015

Last month the Government confirmed that their Broadband Delivery UK project with BT had so far managed to extend superfast (24Mbps+) capable “fibre broadband” services to 3,311,843 extra premises and today we’ve also got the latest consumer take-up figures for each local authority.

As usual the following figures for September 2015 (Q3) only reflect take-up in areas that have been upgraded through Phase 1 of the state aid supported scheme (i.e. % subscribed of premises passed in BDUK intervention areas), which excludes any uptake achieved through purely commercial deployments.

Naturally for proper context the percentages below need to be considered alongside the most recent premises passed (network coverage) data for each local authority (here), although it’s clear from the latest tally that more regions are hitting or closing in on the all-important 20% threshold.

Understanding take-up is important because it links into the clawback (gain share) clause in BDUK’s contracts, which requires BT to return part of the investment when adoption of the new service passes beyond the 20% mark in related areas. Initially up to £129m could be returned via clawback to help improve coverage across the UK (here) and this will rise further as take-up improves.

As usual we’ve added the results from previous quarters to help show the change over time.

Remember that take-up is a dynamically scaled measurement, which means that at certain stages of the scheme it may go up or even down depending upon the pace of reported deployment and other factors, although over time the take-up should only rise (early phases of the roll-out are easier and faster to deploy, so you can expect to see a bit of yo-yo movement). Younger contracts can also be expected to report lower take-up.

Some of the other factors that can impact take-up include higher prices for FTTC/P services (less attractive), consumers being locked into long contracts with their existing ISP (can’t upgrade yet) and a lack of general availability awareness (locals don’t know it exists) or interest in the new connectivity (if you have a decent ADSL2+ speed then you might feel less inclined to upgrade right away).

In other cases the new service may run out of capacity (i.e. demand is higher than expected), which means that people who want to upgrade are prevented from doing so until Openreach resolves the problem.

NOTE: No uptake data exists for the Phase 2 BDUK (95% UK coverage target) contracts yet because most of those are far too young and have yet to enter the deployment phase (this usually starts around the end of Phase 1).