2018 Q1 UK Fixed Superfast Broadband Coverage Reaches 95.1%

An independent model has estimated that the coverage of fixed “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services across the United Kingdom has grown slightly from 94.7% in December 2017 (here) to 95.1% at the end of March 2018, with most of the increase being fuelled by publicly funded projects.

The latest modelling has been produced by Thinkbroadband, which wisely tends to be a bit more pessimistic than official Government figures (both are estimates). On top of that it’s important to remember that the first 76% of coverage was largely achieved by commercial roll-outs from Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media (plus a few alternative network ISPs), while much of the final 25-30% has benefited from £1.6bn+ of public funding via the Broadband Delivery UK programme (matched by contributions from private operators).

Officially the Government aimed to extend “superfast broadband” to 95% of the UK by the end of 2017 and they just about delivered (here). The state aid fuelled BDUK programme has also indicated that a future combination of public funding reinvestment (i.e. clawback / gainshare from high take-up in earlier BDUK deployments) and new contracts could push UK coverage to 98% by around 2020 (here).

The expectation is that this will leave up to around 2% of premises to suffer slower sub-24Mbps connections and those are expected to be catered for via the Government’s 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO), which is currently still in the final design phase (details); after rejecting a voluntary solution from BT (here).

Separately the Government has also committed another c.£600 million+ to support future “full fibre” (FTTP/H) and related “ultrafast” (100Mbps+) broadband deployments (here and here), although that is more about helping to foster the rollout of new alternative networks (altnets) than expanding coverage deeper into poorly served rural areas. Full fibre networks currently only reach 3.64% of the UK.

Below you can see the latest data to the end of March (Q1 2018) and as usual we’ve stripped out some of the more confusing aspects in order to make it easier to understand. We’ve also left in the 10Mbps figure as this will be a useful gauge for understanding the ever shrinking scale of the proposed 10Mbps USO for broadband.

Naturally we’re now seeing coverage growth slow significantly as the focus turns to the most rural / challenging areas, which will make it a slow crawl to reach 98% over the next couple of years. Due to this we may swap to biannual updates after the next quarterly report.

NOTE 1: The term “fibre based” above includes fibre optic and hybrid fibre solutions, such as FTTP, FTTC / VDSL2 / G.fast and Cable (DOCSIS), albeit without any definition of speed (e.g. some FTTC lines will deliver speeds below 24Mbps).

NOTE 2: Nearly all of the “ultrafast” (100Mbps+) coverage is coming from Virgin Media’s cable network, although Openreach, Hyperoptic, Gigaclear, Cityfibre, TrueSpeed and others all have big “full fibre” (FTTP/H) expansion ambitions for related services (here, here, here, here and here) and the rapid 330Mbps G.fast roll-out to 10 million UK premises by 2020 should also help.

NOTE 3: Recent BDUK contracts have adopt the EU and Ofcom’s higher download speed target of 30Mbps+ for “superfast” connectivity, which on average tends to trail around 0.3-0.6% points behind the 24Mbps+ figure.

NOTE 4: It’s very important to remember that Government / political targets like 95% or 98% reflect a national average, which can of course be better or worse for some areas (e.g. a few may achieve universal coverage, while others could be well below that level).

Take note that each devolved region has its own policy and targets, which all feed into the central UK target. For example, Wales aspires to reach nearly “every property” with 30Mbps+ broadband by 2020 (here) and Scotland hopes to do something similar by 2021 (here). The ‘Highlands and Islands‘ and ‘Rest of Scotland‘ areas above represent the two halves of Scotland’s overall roll-out programme.

Elsewhere Northern Ireland, which has good “fibre based” coverage, remains one of the weaker entries and they’re clearly struggling to deliver speeds of 24Mbps+ to those within its reach. However a deal between the DUP and UK Government, which gifted £150 million to help N.I “provide ultra-fast broadband” to its population (here), may help to resolve that.

As stated earlier, this data is only an estimate and should be taken with a pinch of salt, not least because it won’t always reflect the real-world (this is particularly true where issues like faulty lines, poor home wiring, slow WiFi, network congestion, street cabinets that are full to capacity and other problems can result in much slower speeds than expected). However it’s still one of the best gauges that we have for checking against official claims.