Britain climbs broadband quality chart, but could do better

Report shows UK broadband quality has improved, but is still behind neighbouring countries

Britian is ranked 18th in broadband quality according to a recent study

The UK has increased its international rating for broadband, in terms of the quality and reach of its broadband networks, by 20 per cent over the last three years.

The Broadband Quality Study 2010, commissioned by Cisco and conducted by University of Oxford’s Said Business School and the University of Oviedo, shows that the UK can now “comfortably enjoy today’s applications”, ranking it higher than countries such as Spain, Bulgaria and Australia.

The study shows that in 2010 there was a 39 per cent improvement in download throughput in the UK compared with 2009, a 17 per cent improvement in upload throughput and a decrease in latency of 28 per cent.

The study also places the UK in the category of "broadband penetration leaders", with three-quarters of UK households having access to broadband, a seven per cent increase in penetration over the past two years.

UK still has much to do

According to Cisco, this reflects the hard work done by UK internet service providers to improve speeds and connectivity across the UK.

However, Scott Morrison, research VP at Gartner, still feels that the UK government is lagging behind other European countries in its efforts to improve broadband quality.

“There has been more of a concerted effort in the public and private sectors of other European countries than has been the case in the UK, where it has been relatively laissez-faire,” he said.

“Despite what BT would say, there has not been the same level of competitive effort put in by alternative providers to generate better quality broadband services.”

He cited the example of France, which ranks 15th in the study, yet has the same population over more than twice the land surface. Morrison argued that in most cases broadband quality is dependent on distance; the further you are from an exchange the more difficult it is to get the high broadband speed and the more you have to invest to get to those speeds.

“Relatively speaking, large countries should be worse off when measuring latency and overall performance. One would expect the UK, because of its relatively high population density to do better than some of its European counterparts that have lower population density,” Morrison said.

He blamed the lack of effort from the UK public sector in forcing through broadband upgrades, and argued that government work on deploying fibre broadband in areas such as South Yorkshire, Wales, Northern Scotland has been “patchwork” rather than a holistic nationwide effort.

“BT is deploying ADSL 2+ technology fairly quickly, but they haven’t pushed local unbundling, they haven’t deployed in hard-to-reach areas and they haven’t created service offers that are standard and national in the way that other countries have,” he said.

Meanwhile, in France, France Telecom has had to play catch-up with other vendors in the marketplace where the latter were deploying local unbundling anywhere they could. These vendors also offered the same basic service in locations where they didn’t have local unbundling as far as was possible to increase their market share.

“There’s a lack of appetite in the competitive market in the UK to go beyond what BT serves up,” Morrison said.

He urged organisations to work more holistically, rather than each creating a local network, and paying more as a result.

“If there was more of a holistic effort made to combine requirements of the public and private sectors to generate more widespread initiatives we’d be in a better place. The UK government’s spending review would be an ideal place to do that.”