Superfast Broadband Passed 19.6 Million UK Premises at the End of 2012

Telecoms analyst Point Topic reports that, at the end of last year, superfast broadband ISP connections had passed 19.6 Million premises in the United Kingdom (up from 16.9m in June 2012) and 3.3 Million had subscribed to one of the related services.

The total, which also includes data from smaller altnet providers like Gigaclear and Hyperoptic, notes that BT and Virgin Media still dominate the market with each covering around half of the country (note that their networks frequently overlap, especially in dense urban areas).

Overall the analyst states that the UK is now “closing in on the 70% target” (coverage), which is roughly similar to Ofcom’s latest estimate of 67.9% (here). So far the vast.. vast majority of this has occurred as a direct result of private sector investment and some regulatory changes, although state aid (Broadband Delivery UK) supported projects are now slowly beginning to get underway.

Never the less the private sector will probably continue to drive most of the expansion until Spring 2014 when BT aims to have reached 19 million premises with its £2.5bn investment (around 66% of the UK). BT currently passes 15 million premises (50%) with its FTTC/P technologies and Virgin Media has no significant expansion plans.

Separately Point Topic has also forecast that there will be 940 million broadband subscribers across the world by the end of 2018 and the rate of growth is expected to remain fairly static, except for in parts of South and East Asia where growth will continue to boom in emerging markets.