Q1 2017 UK “Fibre Broadband” Take-up Figures for the £1.7bn BDUK Rollout

The Government’s £1.7bn Broadband Delivery UK project has published its latest Q1 2017 take-up data for their roll-out of “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services across the United Kingdom, which is a key gauge for how much public investment suppliers (e.g. BT) will have to return.

Unfortunately we’ve had to wait a long time for today’s update, with the last batch of data (Q3 2016) being released all the way back in December last year (here). One reason for the long wait was the decision to hold a surprise General Election in June, which stopped a lot of information being released (purdah). At the same time BDUK has also been going through some internal staff / leadership changes.

The good news is that we now have the latest data, although BDUK has skipped Q4 2016 and published Q1 2017 instead. As usual the figures predominantly reflect % customer take-up of superfast broadband networks in areas that have been upgraded through the BDUK programme (i.e. % subscribed of premises passed by BDUK supported networks). At present the data only reflects the first two phases of this programme.

BDUK Phases One (Completed Spring 2016)

This was supported by £530m of public money via the Government (mostly extracted from a small slice of the BBC TV Licence fee), as well as significant match funding from local authorities, the EU and BT. Overall it helped to extend “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services to cover 90% of homes and businesses in the United Kingdom.

BDUK Phase Two (Completion by 2017/18)

This is supported by £250m of public money via the Government, as well as match funding from local authorities, Local Growth Deals and some from ISPs (e.g. BT, Gigaclear, Airband, Call Flow etc.). The aim is to extend 24Mbps+ capable broadband services to cover 95% of homes and businesses by around the end of 2017.

The original Phase One was dominated by Openreach (BT) linked contracts, which predominantly installed their ‘up to’ 40-80Mbps FTTC and a tiny bit of Gigabit capable FTTP technology (not to mention various trials of alternative methods). By comparison Phase Two, which is now in full swing, has seen a mix of contracts signed with BT and several alternative network providers (Gigaclear, Call Flow etc.), including some use of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) technology.

Understanding take-up is crucial because it links into the clawback (gainshare) mechanism of related contracts, which requires suppliers (e.g. BT) to return part of the public investment when customer adoption of the new service passes beyond the 20% mark in related areas. The funding can then be reinvested to further improve coverage and speeds via future contracts.

At the last count the clawback mechanism was on course to help return up to £446 million (here) and it’s been predicted that the related reinvestment from this could help to take UK coverage of superfast broadband networks from 95% by the end of 2017 to 97% by the end of 2020.

The following table breaks the take-up data down by each local authority (project area), although for the proper context these percentages should ideally be considered alongside the most recent premises passed data (see bottom). So far BDUK has helped to expand superfast broadband services to 4.42 million+ UK premises (here).

NOTE: Some of the counties have divided their roll-out into separate projects / contracts. For example, Phase One in Shropshire doesn’t include the ‘Telford and Wrekin‘ area because that is part of a separate Phase Two contract inside the same county. We also only have partial data for BDUK Phase 2 as many of the related contracts have only just entered the deployment phase.

BDUK Phase One Take-up (Average %)

BDUK Phase Two Take-up (Average %)

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.

Explained 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. Some contracts are also younger than others and will thus take time to catch-up. However BDUK’s roll-out pace is also starting to slow as they reach tricky rural areas (Phase 2), which will give take-up a chance to climb in Phase 1.

A number of other factors can also impact take-up, such as the higher prices for related “fibre” services, as well as customers being locked into long contracts with their existing ISP (they 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. However the scale of this issue is very small.

Now, for some context, here’s the latest progress report on related contacts to the end of December 2016 (sadly we don’t have the Q1 2017 data yet) March 2017.

Funding and Premises Passed Progress (BDUK Phase 1 + 2)

The above figures only include 24Mbps+ capable premises in BDUK intervention areas.

UPDATE 13th July 2017

The BDUK team incorrectly labelled the table directly above for December 2016, although they’ve since corrected it for March 2017 and we have updated accordingly.