Study – 90% of UK Broadband Lines Fast Enough for Home Working

New crowd-sourced based research from benchmarking firm umlaut (formerly P3) has claimed that more than 90% of the UK’s active fixed broadband ISP lines deliver internet connection speeds that “meet the challenges of working from home,” at least with respect to the narrow scope of video conferencing apps.

The company reached its conclusions after collecting 70 million+ samples (e.g. connection tests) from more than 345,000 broadband lines (conducted between 1st March and 31st May 2020). The research then considered those results against its belief that, by default, video conferences usually take place in HD quality video (1.5Mbps) or so-called HQHD quality (3Mbps).

Sadly umlaut doesn’t clearly define what it means by SD (0.6Mbps), HD (1.5Mbps), HGHD (3Mbps) and UHD (15Mbps) video quality, but from those speeds we can perhaps reasonably assume that they meant to say 480p, 720p, 1080p and 4K resolutions respectively.

Nevertheless, the company reported that 56.6% of broadband lines across the United Kingdom could achieve UHD, while 91.5% could do HGHD, 96.1% seemed able to handle HD and some 99% were able to manage SD. But the picture does tend to vary a bit by region, although they seem to have overlooked upload speed, which is rather important for video calls.

“Only, when video platforms are used in addition to other applications when working from home, there are some restrictions. However, problems with the connection can be often traced back to shared connections or the terminal device [router] itself. Also, no obvious differences between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland could be identified,” said the report.

Hakan Ekmen, CEO of umlaut Telecommunication, said:

“Overall, the results of our crowd-based evaluation of fixed lines in the UK are encouraging. More than 90 percent of the lines in the UK have easily met the challenges of working from home. We only see restrictions when video platforms with UHD streaming are used in addition to video conferencing.”

As usual we have spotted a few big caveats to this report, such as the fact that it’s looking at broadband by adoption rather than the availability of potentially faster networks or packages. Just to put that into some quick context, over 96% of UK premises should be able to access a “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+ download) network (here), but at the same time a little under a third of consumers still take slower ADSL lines and uploads are often much weaker than the downstream rate.

Likewise, the use of crowdsourced data can be a bit of a mixed bag, particularly since umlaut tends to rely on background diagnosis testing that can be conducted via hundreds of different Smartphone apps (Android). As a result, there’s no easy way to know how much of an impact various issues, such as any limitations of the mobile device itself or slow WiFi speeds, have had vs a proper wired connection to the broadband router.

Equally there’s no consideration for more variable factors, such as the possibility of local network congestion (likely to be more of a problem in a busy family environment) or the fact that video conferencing isn’t the only work-related task. Some businesses, such as media and graphic design firms, will have much bigger demands for remote working connections than a vanilla office job.

In short, this survey doesn’t actually tell us all that much, so take it with a pinch of salt.