Telecoms analyst firm Point Topic has today published a new map of superfast broadband take-up in the United Kingdom, which predictably reveals that adoption of superfast services appears to be strongest in areas where it has been “available for some time” (e.g. Northern Ireland, which is said to have “encouraging” adoption rates).
At the end of June 2012, Point Topic reported 21.27 million broadband lines across the UK (19.39m consumer lines and 1.88m business lines) and noted that just over two million of those were said to be “superfast connections” (9.4% of the total base); mostly from BT and Virgin Media. Ofcom’s recent 2012 Infrastructure Report also found that superfast broadband (25Mbps+) was available to 65% of UK homes and businesses.
The map itself (below) shows green areas with strong superfast take-up and red areas with weak levels of adoption, which is naturally worse in rural areas where superfast services remain broadly non-existent. Point Topic’s related report said, “Whilst delays in achieving sign-off for the funding have been disappointing we expect to see much less ‘red’ in the UK by 2015” (i.e. when state aid aims to help push BT’s related FTTC/P network out to 90% of people in each local authority area).
Earlier this year Point Topic predicted that the UK would be home to around 26 million broadband lines by the end of 2016, with 10.8 million expected to come from a new generation of superfast “FTTx” (fibre optic) based connections (this apparently equates to 89% of UK premises with next gen broadband coverage).
As it stands Point Topic’s new map isn’t a lot of help and mostly just says what people could already guess, although sometimes it’s useful to visualise the statistics in a way that helps put the scale of this problem into context. The full report can be found below.
Mapping Broadband in the UK – Q2 2012 (PDF)
http://point-topic.com/…/Take-Up Report Final.pdf
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