UK achieves 95 per cent superfast broadband coverage

But coverage is still patchy

Ninety-five per cent of residential and business premises across the UK are able to access high-speed internet, according to comparison site Thinkbroadband.

Over the past few years, the UK Government has been working to roll out superfast broadband across the country but has been criticised for slow progress, particularly in some rural areas. However, new data shows that it's finally reached 95 per cent coverage. The majority of the British public can now access broadband connections of more than 24 Mbps, the firm said, adding that some places are better served than others.

"We need to get this caveat in very quickly, the 95 per cent target is not a consistent 95 per cent across all communities in the UK," it said.

Areas such as Epsom, Tamworth, Worthing and Watford are pushing into the 99 per cent coverage zone, while the City of London (50.3 per cent) Orkney Islands (66.8 per cent), Western Isles (71 per cent) and Kingston Upon Hull (71.7 per cent) lag behind. Hatherden and Wildhern in Hampshire still lacks any superfast coverage whatsoever.

The rollout consists of a "mixture of commercial and gap funded solutions", said Thinkbroadband in its summary with some projects beginning to focus on G.fast and FTTP in commercial areas.

"Reaching the 95 per cent is not the end of superfast roll-outs, DCMS [Department for Digital, Media and Sport] is hopeful that the roll-outs will continue as projects continue to announce the use of gainshare allocations and for Wales and Scotland their next contracts are signed," it said.

"The hope is that roll-outs will eventually deliver superfast to 97 per cent to 98 per cent of premises before 2020, and the focus of a lot of the work in terms of tracking coverage now from ourselves, Ofcom and DCMS will be looking into how likely that looks and how many premises fall into the USO category."

People have become frustrated with the slow progress in connecting the final stage of broadband connectivity, Thinkbroadband added.

"The biggest concern people have with the coverage statistics is that they know they cannot get superfast broadband due to the distance from the VDSL2 cabinet, but still presume that Openreach has been paid to deliver it to them and thus feel the projects have been wasting money."