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A Need for 1Gbps Broadband by 2020 Could Deepen the UK Digital Divide

Wednesday, Jul 24th, 2013 (9:15 am) - Score 1,639

Telecoms analyst firm Point Topic has today published a short health check of the United Kingdom’s drive towards making superfast broadband (25-30Mbps+) speeds available across the country, which warns that the future demand for 1000Mbps (Gigabit) broadband connections will widen the digital speed divide between urban and rural areas. So is it time for FTTH?

At present the government’s £1.2bn Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) and related schemes aim to ensure that fixed line superfast broadband connections can reach 95% of the population by 2017 (99% by 2018 when wireless and mobile services are included).

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But this masks a well reported delay to the original target for superfast connections to reach 90% by the end of 2015. Instead the government now states that it expects “around 88% of the country will have access to superfast broadband by December 2015, with an estimated 90% getting [fixed line] superfast coverage by early 2016“.

Similarly Point Topic’s own view concludes that the country is likely to be “pushing into the mid 80’s by the end of 2015” (i.e. around 85%) and that we will “without doubt” achieve coverage of 75% (note: we’re almost there already), which reflects mostly urban and sub-urban areas where the commercial roll-out has already done nearly all of the leg work.

Point Topic notes that this outcome might cause some political problems, although they state that “economically the impact is minimal“. Broadly the analyst concludes that “progress is reasonable and while it could always be better there are few projects of this scale and complexity that run smoothly“.

But what comes next? This is the question that a lot of people, especially advocates of fully fibre optic connectivity (FTTH/P), have been asking for almost as long as broadband has been a familiar word in the national vocabulary. Point Topic warns that Nielsen’s Law of Internet Bandwidth (i.e. a high-end user’s connection speed grows by 50% per year) and current growth suggests that “mass residential demand will hit a requirement” for 1Gbps speeds by 2020 (1000 Megabits per second). By comparison Europe wants 100% of homes to get speeds of 30Mbps+ by the same year.

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In fairness Nielsen’s Law is somewhat of an over-simplification for a very dynamic market since you’re unlikely to NEED 1Gbps to use the internet by 2020 but certainly it might arguably look just as attractive as say a 50Mbps or 100Mbps service might do to your eyes today. Also take note that Nielsen’s Law tends to work better when talking about headline speeds, while real-world performance usually rises at a much slower pace due to capacity costs/restrictions or people choosing cheaper slower speed packages.

Never the less Point Topic does make a useful point about the need to be ready.

Point Topic Statement

Mass residential demand will hit a requirement for 1Gbps by 2020, perhaps even earlier, and as it stands we estimate only about 70% to 75% of UK premises could theoretically have those bandwidths available to them assuming a G.Fast deployment by that time.

The result is that we project that the digital divide in the UK will deepen from now until the end of the decade as gigabit bandwidths are made available in certain areas but not in others. The major issue will be with those households and businesses who are not in a Virgin Media or other fibre operators footprint (Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, Digital Region, B4RN etc) and who depend on the BT network for their broadband.

The crux of this argument appears to be that even if all the future G.Fast and perhaps also FTTdp enhancements to BT’s copper network are adopted (see our new article on G.Fast and FTTdp for more) then this will still only benefit the predominantly urban and sub-urban parts of the country, while rural areas (where longer copper lines are more common = slower speeds) would increasingly be left behind as the speed gap widens.

According to Point Topic this could help the case for a full end-to-end fibre optic network but it still isn’t “clear whether it has reached the tipping point where deployment costs are offset by recovery in a suitable time span“. Never the less, future governments may need to consider the other benefits of broadband, to individuals, to communities and to society in general.

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But all this does beg the question, if we need to return to do full FTTH/P in the future then why not start now instead of tomorrow and get a head start without risk of duplicating the investment? The alternative viewpoint is that we’ve already started and that BT’s move to FTTC, followed by G.Fast and or FTTdp, effectively represents a gradual progression towards a full fibre network. As usual though, rural areas will probably be the last to benefit.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and .
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