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Top 25 UK Local Authorities for Full Fibre Broadband 2018 vs 2017

Wednesday, Oct 10th, 2018 (12:28 pm) - Score 2,726

The latest batch of independent data has revealed the top 25 local authorities across the United Kingdom with the highest availability of ultrafast “full fibre” (FTTP / FTTH) broadband ISP connectivity and their change since 2017. Locations such as Hull, the East Riding of Yorkshire and Cornwall come top.

The data, which has been produced by Andrew from Thinkbroadband, shows that Hull and East Yorkshire have the most coverage in the UK, which are both as a direct result of KCOM’s on-going Lightstream roll-out that is dominated by their ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network (see today’s KCOM news).

Similarly Cornwall also appears near the top, albeit thanks to a huge public-private partnership style investment with Openreach (BT). Funnily enough the situation in Cornwall has also been the subject of an indirectly related news story today (here), which talks more about the local FTTP developments and saves me having to repeat myself.

Meanwhile many of the other areas have been boosted by similar roll-outs from Gigaclear, Hyperoptic, B4RN, Community Fibre, Virgin Media and various other “full fibre” providers. For example, Cityfibre’s joint FTTP deployment alongside TalkTalk in York has clearly had an impact.

Suffice to say that we are seeing a significant ramping up of civil engineering work, although it will need to go a lot faster to meet the Government’s initial ambition of 15 million premises by 2025 and then nationwide to all by 2033 (here). The latter date would require a huge public investment and is currently just a vague aspiration.

At present just 5% of the UK can access such a network or 1.4 million premises and ideally we need to be adding around 2 million per year just to meet the Government’s aspiration, which is an incredibly difficult task.

Top 25 UK Local Authorities for Full Fibre Broadband

Rank Local Authority % of premises with full fibre (2018) 2017
1 City of Kingston Upon Hull 84.70% 58.25%
2 East Riding of Yorkshire 39.08% 36.77%
3 Cornwall 35.79% 31.95%
4 Tower Hamlets 35.42% 27%
5 City and County of the City of London 34.75% 32.35%
6 York 32.79% 24.7%
7 Ards and North Down 30.82% no data
8 Cotsworld District 29.19% 21.18%
9 Spelthorne District 28.98% 27.39%
10 Newham 25.44% 11.94%
11 West Berkshire 24.01% 21.93%
12 Waltham Forest 22.24% 21.27%
13 Wandsworth 21.81% 8.99%
14 Bournemouth 20.67% 20.46%
15 Rutland 19.32% 16.01%
16 City of Westminster 19.09% 10.31%
17 Sir Ceredigion – Ceredigion 18.70% 7.31%
18 Southwark 18.56% 8.82%
19 Sir Yns Mon – Isle of Anglesey 18.44% 12.57%
20 Powys 18.13% 12.13%
21 Milton Keynes 18.12% 13.43%
22 Fenland District 17.05% 0.54%
23 Tewkesbury District 16.90% 3.24%
24 Gwynedd 15.58% 11.71%
25 South Northamptonshire 15.41% 10.39%
NOTE: The 2017 data comes from September of last year.
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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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Comments
17 Responses
  1. Avatar photo A_Builder says:

    Good to see some really big jumps for instance Wandsworth 10 to 20%. Now, while most of that is social housing and new build, for instance the embassy quarter and the Ram brewery sites, it is still a lot of premises that nobody needs to worry about connectivity for for an awful long time.

    But also disappointing to see some authorities asleep at the wheel with Bournemouth for instance at no real change. Can that be right as I though VM were doing work in that area or does the data not allow VM FTTP-RFROG as it is not pure FTTP? Andrew?

    1. Mark-Jackson Mark Jackson says:

      I’m not sure how much FTTP Virgin has in Bournemouth, but a big chunk of that will be coming from the legacy FTTH network that Cityfibre acquired after the fall of i3/H2O some years ago. Since then they haven’t done much with that fibre and at the last attempt I found you couldn’t even sign-up with the linked ISP, Gigler.

      Openreach doesn’t have any real FTTP in the area, but they do have a growing base of G.fast.

    2. Avatar photo A_Builder says:

      @MJ

      You are right: I was getting confused with the VM deployment in New Milton etc which is where relatives live.

      The i3/H2O thing is suggestive of poor records being available as to how the network was set out and some failures that therefore are hard to find and fix. I can’t imagine why else you would not want to earn cash from something that you already own.

      One nasty scenario when a business goes under is that all critical data is cloudy and that the bill to the cloud provider is not paid and then the bit barn deletes the data. Or the Administrator doesn’t see the value in paying the bill and therefore…..

      Or the other is that a cheesed off employee wipes the lot in a fit or pique for an unpaid month of salary etc

      Although it is very off topic there is a frequently repeated story that one of the old cable companies let a lot of the network design team go, after they were taken over, and the last time anyone saw the network layouts was in a dumpster. It was all A1 and A0 paper at that time. I have heard the same story from four people. Hence there are no original design records for that area of London. It has been remapped since then using Cat & Jenny oscillator through the braid: anyone with any tech knowledge will know exactly whom we are talking about……..

    3. Avatar photo Joe says:

      A familiar tale. The law probably should put in better base record keeping requirements.

      (As an aside an amusing recent project saw an water pipe damaged laying fib. As it was in several places and the pipe was c1950s they decided to lay new alkathene. When they connected the house up they found they had water at one end of the houses but not the other. Many many days later they worked out that they had two mains entries! One for each half of the house!)

  2. Avatar photo Rob says:

    Disappointing to see no Scottish local authorities in the top 25

    1. Avatar photo Joe says:

      The SNPs ego and the delays of r100 has really not helped.

  3. Avatar photo edward reece says:

    How accurate are these figures? My brother-in-laws address over on TBB tools/checkers/maps returns as NO Openreach/BT FTTP or VM FTTP available yet his whole road has both available.

    1. Mark-Jackson Mark Jackson says:

      TBB is often a bit behind the latest roll-out because it takes time to verify that new deployments are actually live. Of course you could help them by dropping an email into their team.

    2. Avatar photo joseph says:

      After reading the story and seeing how well Kcom is doing i decided to feed Kcoms own site and TBB postcode checker an address of more than a few years back when i was living up there for a temporary 9 month period whilst doing a course for my old job.

      Kcoms site returned the postcode no issues informing me it is now capable of their 400Mb service, but TBBs postcode check did not even recognise the postal code at all. So ironically and amazingly (compared to the ADSL 7Mb i had back then with Kcom) in this case the 84.70% figure for KCOM may actually be better 😀

    3. Avatar photo edward reece says:

      @MarkJ Thanks will try to remember to give them an email by end of the week 🙂

      His home though is not what i would call new deployment (or new property) Openreach/BT FTTP has been there since 2016 and Virgin Media FTTP as part of project lightning since around march(ish) of 2017.

  4. Avatar photo Paul Pennington says:

    The least expensive lightstream package from k.com is£42 per month for 200 GB of data. It would be interesting to see how this compares with other fibre broadband suppliers.

    1. Avatar photo Dominic Jones says:

      I have seen some of the tariff prices from various suppliers and all bar 1 do ‘Tiered’ access (various speeds and limits for variable prices)

      Only 1 company does ‘Full Throttle’ (900MB+ and unlimited Data) and that is TalkTalk in York

    2. Avatar photo joseph says:

      @paul £42 for a 200Mb product i would say falls in the middle pricing wise. People like B4RN and other non-massive suppliers will beat that speed and price quite easily and offer significantly faster for around £30 a month.

      Compare that £42 figure for 200Mb to Virgin or BT and it is a few quid cheaper (excluding special xxx price for xxx months which BT and Virgin often pimp to get new sign ups).

      @dominic Kcom from memory on their business web pages do a 1Gbps download service but if you want it its silly money, something like £160 when i looked.

    3. Avatar photo Spiderpig says:

      That’s only what’s on their website, but they have much cheaper full-fibre services on offer. You can get 30Mbps for as little as £26, but their cheapest 75Mbps service is £35 for 100GB. Ideal for light users.

      No calls included though.

  5. Avatar photo AndyC says:

    Is the isle of jersey allowed in this since it is uk terratory?

    They are claiming 100% full fibre coverage

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-45810063

    1. Avatar photo AndyC says:

      Never mind i can now see the isle of anglesey is connected to the mainland by 2 roads so no jersey isnt valid…..

      still nice p.r. for the island

    2. Avatar photo HV says:

      Jersey is not part of the United Kingdom. It is what remains of the Duchy of Normandy, and it is ruled by the Duke of Normandy, who happens to be the Queen, who is not called queen there as a queen of a foreign nation would not wield any authority there.

      This of course has very little to do with their internet connectivity but there is a very logical reason why Jersey and Guernsey are not included in the UK numbers. And quibbling about trivia is always a worthy reason to post a response…

Comments are closed

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