Just 6% of UK Businesses Have a 100Mbps+ Broadband Connection

The Office for National Statistics has published their annual E-commerce and ICT report, which offers some interesting statistics for UK business broadband connectivity to the end of 2015 (not exactly recent). Overall 83% of all businesses had Internet access (unchanged from 2014), but speeds vary.

Apparently take-up of Internet access by businesses varies depending upon company size, with 99% of firms that had 50 or more employees tending to be connected and this drops to 94.7% for those with 10-49 employees or 81.6% for “micro-enterprises” (0-9 employees).

The majority of businesses have a fixed line based Internet connection, with 80.7% continuing to use fixed broadband (DSL etc.) in 2015 (down from 81.7% in 2014). Meanwhile 55.6% of businesses made use of a Mobile Broadband (3G or 4G) service, which is up from 46.9% in 2014. Mobile tends to be adopted as a complimentary solution to fixed lines, as opposed to being a replacement.

The report also measured the maximum contracted download speed of businesses in the following bands: less than 2Mbps (Megabits per second), 2Mbps to 10Mbps, 10Mbps to 30Mbps, 30Mbps to 100Mbps and 100Mbps+. The Government claims that 91% of the country is now within reach of a fixed line “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) network, but business uptake is a bit more mixed.

Apparently only 6.9% of businesses reported speeds less than 2 Mbps, while the number of businesses subscribing to broadband with a connection speed between 30Mbps and 100Mbps has increased from 12.8% in 2014 to 16.9% in 2015. Meanwhile some 5.9% of businesses now make use of speeds above 100Mbps.

Naturally the size of a business has a large effect on the likely Internet connection speed it will subscribe to. The most common connection speed for the smallest businesses was between 2Mbps and 10Mbps at 22.8%. In contrast, the largest (1,000 or more employees) businesses were most likely to subscribe to 100Mbps+ broadband (56.3%).

We should point out that the ONS appears to be reflecting advertised package performance rather than real-world testing. Otherwise it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions from this data, not least since every business is different and not all need an ultrafast connection.

Likewise it’s worth pointing out that only 50.1% of all businesses had their own website (i.e. 97.0% for the largest firms, 80.6% for businesses with 10 to 49 employees and 46.4% for micro-enterprises) and just 35.0% used social media (up from 32.0% in 2014), rising to 85.8% of the largest businesses and falling to 30.4% for micro-enterprises.