Oftels latest (July) broadband brief has found that roughly one in five UK homes with Internet access has broadband. Uptake as a whole has increased three fold over last year, with ADSL leading on 1.18 million connections vs cable modems 1.141.

Low prices combined with availability to 71% (had been 69% in May 2003) of UK homes and businesses has attributed to ADSLs lead. By comparison cable modems cover just 45%.

To date BT has enabled 1,507 local exchanges and there continue to be over 100 UK ISPs offering ADSL based packages. Interestingly Oftel still refers to broadband as anything on or above 128Kbps:

'Broadband' is used in this brief to refer to higher bandwidth, always-on services, offering data rates of 128kbps and above.

Despite all this the regulator estimates that an overall total of 30,000 new broadband connections are created every week. Out of the entire population, 9% of households have some form of broadband.

2,500 users are believed to come from wireless services with over 5,500 being connected via some form of satellite system.