UPDATE Government Close to Achieving 90% UK Superfast Broadband Goal

The Government’s Broadband Delivery UK project takes a lot of flak, but this often overlooks some of the good progress that has been made. New data now appears to confirm that the original 90% coverage target for “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) availability is finally within touching distance.

At this point we should highlight that, prior to BDUK, commercial investment had already helped operators like BT and Virgin Media to expand fixed line superfast connectivity to around 70% of the UK. However those ISPs were slow or unwilling to invest in connecting the final 30%, which are more expensive to tackle, and so the Government’s BDUK programme was formed.

The 90% target was originally set as part of BDUK’s first funding phase (£530m from the Government / BBC TV Licence fee) and this was initially targeted to be achieved during 2015, although they later tweaked that to “by 2016” in order to allow some breathing room after administrative delays.

All of the contracts for BDUK Phase One are being delivered by BT, which has predominantly used its ‘up to’ 80Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) service and a little FTTP. A second target also exists for pushing this coverage to 95% by the end of 2017/18 (adds another 1 million+ premises with some input from altnet ISPs), but we’ll focus on that after 90% is achieved.

The most recent data from BDUK, which was published at the very end of 2015 (here), reported that 3.5 million additional premises have so far benefited from the programme; the 90% coverage target is expected to be achieved at around the 4 million+ mark (a Spring 2016 completion is expected).

Naturally we wanted to offer a bit more data to show the current level of “superfast” (24Mbps+) and “fibre based” (includes lines that also deliver sub-24Mbps speeds) coverage by each local authority / district area. Luckily we can always rely upon Thinkbroadband to help us fill in the gaps and they’ve kindly furnished us with the full data.

Overall some 88.7% of the UK can now order a superfast broadband connection (92.5% for raw “fibre based” coverage), although obviously this estimate doesn’t account for any problems (slow speeds) caused by local network capacity or poor home wiring etc. Likewise the figures below only include the impact from BT, Virgin Media and KC’s deployments (altnets only have a tiny impact at national scale and aren’t yet factored).

NOTE: The following list of local authorities looks at more than county-level coverage. For example, Poole and Bournemouth are both part of Dorset in England, although they also have their own separate entries below. Likewise we also include districts.

Wales (85.1% “superfast”)

Scotland (82.1% “superfast”)

Northern Ireland (77.7% “superfast”)

UPDATE: The entry for Shropshire has been updated to reflect a change to Thinkbroadband’s data, which slightly raises their figure to 81.4% “fibre” and 71.6% “superfast”. In addition, it’s important to note that this excludes Telford and Wrekin.

England (89.8% “superfast”)

Check out the https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local micro-site for a searchable database of broadband network coverage across the United Kingdom.