Broadband News

Ofcom report on communications services around UK

Ofcom has published a communications market report, that covers all the areas in the bodies remit, TV, telephone services, Internet access, digital TV/Radio. The document can be downloaded as a PDF document from here, and before you send it to the printer remember it is 126 pages long.

We will look at a few of the possibly key statistics relevant to the broadband audience, but for those looking at regional variations a closer read of the document is a must. We will add also that in respect of the broadband availability figures, these are based on 'households passed by the network' for ntl/Telewest and 'households connected to an enabled exchange', in both cases there will be properties not able to get a service, either due to things like wayleave issues, or length of metallic line to a property. In terms of ADSL, of the eight million running ADSL connections, there is around a further 32,000 who have applied for the service but failed to get a working ADSL service. This is the basis for the often quoted 0.4% who cannot get ADSL. While the percentage is small, it is of no comfort to those who cannot get broadband in any reasonably affordable form. For an example of a cluster on the far limits of reach, with some getting the slowest speeds and some nothing, one only needs to look at parts of Docklands in London (E16 postcode).

UK Region

Cable availability

ADSL availability

LLU availability

Number of households (million)

Premises with implied 5km line length

Premises with implied 2km line length

Scotland 37.1% 99.9% 28.9% 2.19 87% 22%
North East 47.8% 100% 14.5% 1.07 84% 14%
Northern Ireland 30.1% 100% 0% 0.63 74% 16%
North West 50% 100% 63.2% 2.82 86% 14%
Yorkshire and Humberside 42.9% 100% 39% 2.09 83% 15%
East Midlands 51.6% 100% 49% 1.74 82% 16%
Wales 22.6% 99.5% 15.4% 1.19 82% 19%
West Midlands 56.3% 99.9% 48.7% 2.16 88% 14%
East of England 48.6% 99.6% 31.6% 2.26 82% 17%
London 58% 100% 95% 3.17 97% 20%
South West 34.2 99.8% 30.2% 2.10 84% 19%
South East 42.1% 99.9% 36.3% 3.35 85% 16%

A word needs to said on the implied line length column. The implied means it is not based an actual measurements, but is rather an estimate based around the distance in a straight line multiplied by the the square root of 2, (~1.4). This means that things like local geography and anomalies in how the cables are routed are not taken into account, which also goes some way to explaining what looks like a large difference to this report back in June 2005. The 2km figures are interesting, a line of this length can manage around 15Mbps using ADSL2+, but speeds tail off rapidly such that even at just 3km the speed with ADSL2+ will be around 6Mbps.

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