BDUK to Bring Superfast Broadband to 1.8m Extra UK Homes by 2015

Telecoms analyst Point Topic has predicted that superfast broadband (30Mbps+) services, with state aid support through the government’s Broadband Delivery UK office, will cover 1.8 million more homes in the United Kingdom by 2015 than if the only source of investment had been the private sector.

The UK government currently aims to spend around £1bn on bringing superfast broadband to 90% of people by mid-2015, which must also be matched with investment from local councils and the private sector (e.g. BT).

Point Topic states that this will “on average” mean that superfast connectivity reaches 6,700 more households across each of the 273 local authority areas than would have otherwise been possible by the same date.

Oliver Johnson, CEO of Point Topic, said:

“We forecast that the areas receiving BDUK funding will help to drive superfast coverage to 1.8 million more households in the UK by 2015 than would be expected if we relied on commercial deployments alone.”

The analyst also suggests that available bandwidth, the downstream value of the “fastest technology deployed in an area“, is expected to increase by an average of 50% (the uplift ranges from a low +0.5% in places where superfast is already widely available to over +2000% in poorly served areas like Cumbria).

Apparently the current “average of the highest bandwidth available” in BDUK regions today is 52.6Mbps (Megabits per second), which would have risen to just 68Mbps by 2015 without intervention or 83Mbps with BDUK funding as currently intended.

Last year Point Topic similarly estimated that the UK would be home to around 26 million broadband lines by the end of 2016 (currently 21m; roughly 2m of which are “superfast”), with some 10.8m of that figure expected to be delivered via the latest fibre broadband based connections; this also includes business lines.