Ofcom Maps Rising Superfast Broadband Availability for 11 UK Cities

The communications and media regulator, Ofcom, has examined 11 cities across the United Kingdom to assess the availability of standard and superfast broadband Internet connectivity. Overall the study found that faster Next Generation Access (NGA) networks now reach around 90% in most of the cities but wide variations remain.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the proportion of homes and businesses on a “relatively slow broadband connection” tended to be higher in areas with lower incomes. In Belfast for example, although almost all parts of the city have access to superfast broadband, around 5.9% of connections in the poorest areas were below 2Mbps and this fell to just 2.2% in areas with the highest incomes.

Ofcom also noted that superfast broadband (25-30Mbps+) was less-widely available in those parts of the cities with low income. For example, in the most income-deprived areas of Manchester, superfast broadband availability was 80.6% versus 86% across the entire city. But it’s interesting to note that in 8 of the 11 cities, less than 1% of premises which received a sub-2Mbps speed were in areas where NGA broadband was unavailable.

Claudio Pollack, Ofcom’s Consumer Group Director, said:

“Access to fast broadband is an important part of modern life, and a source of economic growth and investment across the UK. We know from previous research that rural areas often lack fast broadband coverage, something the Government is helping to address with public funding.

Today’s findings suggest that the usage and availability of faster broadband also vary widely between cities. We will carry out further work in this area to help bring faster broadband to UK homes, whether in cities or rural areas.”

However the following charts show that, despite the problems, on-going investment by the major operators (e.g. BT and Virgin Media etc.) and the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme is having a positive impact. But we suspect the picture would be quite different if Ofcom were looking at the most rural areas, which will be the last to benefit from BDUK and thus most are still waiting (some will also still be left out by the current 95% target for UK superfast coverage by 2017).

The full report recommends that policy makers in both the Government and telecoms operators need to take a closer look at the factors that can impact take-up and availability of superfast broadband services in different cities.

As part of that recommendation Ofcom has decided to take a closer look at the availability of communications services in densely-populated areas, which will focus on issues such as socio-economic and demographic factors (i.e. “aiming to understand the characteristics of consumers in cities who are most or least likely to adopt communications services“). A full report on this is expected towards the end of 2014.

Take note that Ofcom’s report reflects data from 2013 and the BDUK programme has been having a much more significant impact since the start of 2014.