2020 H1 – UK Gigabit Broadband Covers 22% as FTTP Hits 14.8%

The latest independent model has estimated that the H1 2020 coverage of “full fibre” (FTTP) broadband ISP networks across the UK has risen to 14.8% of premises (up from 11% in H2 2019), while 61.7% can get 100Mbps+ (up from 59.3%) and 22.1% are within reach of “gigabit” (1Gbps) speeds.

Just for context, it’s important to highlight that the first c.76% of “superfast” (30Mbps+) network coverage was largely achieved by commercial roll-outs from Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media (plus some alternative network ISPs), while much of the final 24% has benefited from £1.8bn of public funding via the Building Digital UK project and other schemes (often matched by contributions from private operators).

The original state aid fuelled BDUK scheme has previously indicated that a combination of public funding reinvestment (i.e. clawback / gainshare from high take-up and efficiency savings in earlier BDUK deployments) and new contracts could push UK coverage of superfast speeds to “at least” 98%, but for now we’re still stuck at about 96.4% (96.7% if using the older 24Mbps+ measure). You have to order one of these services in order to benefit (not an automatic upgrade).

As usual that means the remaining gap is left to be filled by the Government’s 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO), which went live a few months ago. Most people taking the USO are being promised speeds of above 10Mbps but a lot of people are already finding that they live in areas where not even the USO can cover the huge upgrade costs involved (and 4G isn’t available), which means they aren’t able to benefit.

More recently the UK Government has committed £5bn to support a future “gigabit-capable” broadband roll-out to the final 20% of hardest to reach UK premises (here), although this means that some premises will be stuck on slow connectivity for a few years longer (the somewhat over-optimistic ambition is to make such connections available to every home by the end of 2025). This is the first time that we’ve included a figure for gigabit services below, thus there’s no history tracking.

Nevertheless, a growing number of FTTP providers are making significant roll-out plans (details) and as such we expect to see a rapid increase in coverage over the next decade. Below you can see the latest modelling from Thinkbroadband to July 2020 (H1) and as usual we’ve stripped out some of the more confusing aspects in order to make it easier to read.

Fixed Broadband Network Availability 2020 H1

NOTE 1: 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 plans. The 330Mbps capable G.fast roll-out to 2.8 million UK premises has had a small impact too.

NOTE 2: It’s very important to remember that Government / political targets like 95% reflect a national average, which can of course be better or worse for some regions (e.g. a few may achieve universal coverage, while others could be well below that).

NOTE 3: The 10Mbps USO figure above looks at fixed broadband services but doesn’t factor the impact of 4G or 5G based mobile broadband, if that were included then the gap left to fill would be much smaller (example).

Naturally the coverage of “superfast” networks has slowed as the roll-out moves to tackle more challenging rural areas, while “full fibre” is growing at a much more rapid pace due to the current focus on that technology in largely urban areas (we expect a fair bit of overbuild in such locations and hence why the ‘ultrafast‘ figure doesn’t rise quite as fast).

In terms of future “gigabit-capable” coverage you should probably be looking toward the “ultrafast” figure as a guide because nearly all networks in that class will soon be able to deliver speeds of 1Gbps (except G.fast but gigabit capable networks are already overbuilding some of that). At present Virgin Media delivers most of the ultrafast coverage but their DOCSIS 3.1 will make 1Gbps possible by the end of 2021.

Take note that each devolved region has its own policy and targets, which all feed into the central UK target. Interestingly while Northern Ireland may be struggling to deliver superfast speeds, their full fibre coverage is way ahead of other areas.

As stated earlier, this data is an estimate and should be taken with a pinch of salt, not least because it won’t always reflect the real-world. But it’s still one of the best gauges that we have for checking against official claims (official figures tend to be a tiny bit higher than TBB’s due to differences in data modelling etc.).