UPDATE The Q4 2015 BDUK and BT UK “Superfast Broadband” Take-up Figures

The Government has today published its latest Q4 2015 uptake figures for their state aid supported roll-out of superfast (24Mbps+) capable “fibre broadband” services across the United Kingdom, which shows that many local authorities are passing the key 20% threshold.

As usual the following figures ONLY reflect take-up (customer subscriptions) of superfast connectivity in areas that have been upgraded through Phase One of the Broadband Delivery UK scheme with BT (i.e. % subscribed of premises passed by BDUK), which has predominantly been rolling out its up to 80Mbps FTTC and some 330Mbps FTTP technology.

Understanding take-up is important because it links into the clawback (gain share) mechanism in BDUK’s contracts, which requires BT to return part of the investment when adoption of the new service passes beyond the 20% mark in related areas.

Initially around £129 million is being returned to local authorities by BT via clawback (more money will be returned as the % of uptake grows) and this can thus be used to help further improve the coverage of faster broadband connectivity across the UK.

The following list breaks down the take-up by each BDUK local authority / project area, although for the proper context these percentages should ideally be considered alongside the most recent premises passed (network coverage) data. At the end of last year BDUK and BT put an additional 3.62 million premises (here) within reach of the faster connectivity, although sadly we don’t have a breakdown of those figures by each local authority (you can usually find this on the individual project websites).

As usual we’ve added the results from previous quarters to help show the change over time, but make sure to read the note at the end for some vital context. In addition, BDUK has so far only provided the Q4 2015 data for England (we will add the latest figures for Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland when they publish it).

IMPORTANT: Take-up is a dynamically scaled measurement, which means that at certain stages of the scheme it may go up or even down depending upon the pace of deployment (i.e. premises passed in any given time-scale), although over time the take-up should only rise.

Put another way, early phases of the roll-out are easier and faster to deploy, so you can expect to see a bit of a yo-yo movement with the take-up % sometimes falling if lots of new areas are suddenly covered. Likewise younger contracts can also be expected to report lower take-up. However BDUK’s roll-out pace is now starting to slow because they’re reaching rural areas, which should give take-up a chance to climb.

A number of other factors that can also impact take-up, such as the higher prices for related FTTC/P services (less attractive for consumers), customers being locked into long contracts with their existing ISP (can’t upgrade immediately) and a lack of general availability awareness (locals don’t know it exists) or interest in the new connectivity (if you have a decent ADSL2+ speed then you might feel less inclined to upgrade).

In other cases the new service may run out of capacity (i.e. demand is higher than expected), which means that people who want to upgrade are prevented from doing so until Openreach resolves the problem.

NOTE: No uptake data currently exists for the most recent Phase 2 BDUK contracts (95% UK coverage target) because most of those are far too young and have yet to even commence the deployment phase.

UPDATE:

The data for Wales, Scotland and N.Ireland has just been added.