UK Full-Fiber Broadband Coverage Jumps From 12% to 78% in Five Years (ft.com) 16
The UK has transformed its broadband infrastructure in five years -- with full-fiber coverage jumping from 12% of properties in January 2020 to more than 78% by 2025, according to communications regulator Ofcom and ThinkBroadband data. Northern Ireland leads with 96% of premises in postcodes served with full-fiber connections.
The rollout accelerated after Ofcom's May 2021 regulatory framework gave other providers access to BT's Openreach ducts and poles while promising the company regulatory certainty through a "fair bet" approach that avoided price caps. The framework sparked investment from alternative networks, or "altnets," which increased homes passed from 8.2 million in 2022 to 16.4 million by 2025.
The rollout accelerated after Ofcom's May 2021 regulatory framework gave other providers access to BT's Openreach ducts and poles while promising the company regulatory certainty through a "fair bet" approach that avoided price caps. The framework sparked investment from alternative networks, or "altnets," which increased homes passed from 8.2 million in 2022 to 16.4 million by 2025.
Great but (Score:2)
UK residential internet and wireless service is still far behind the rest of the developed world. More work needs to be done.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup, moved to NZ from the UK and I went from 80Mbit fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK (and only getting around 50MBit to the house in reality) to getting gigabit fibre to the premises in NZ - and the NZ offering had no caps, got on average 950MBit plus sustained, and was half the price of the UK offering.
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I mean, fair anecdote, but I get 1Gb/s symetric fibre to the premises here in the UK. Without data, it's hard to make the argument you're trying to.
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Yes its an anecdote, and you get 1Gb/s now, sure.
This was 8 years ago - and gigabit fibre to the premises was not new in NZ when I moved here.
And in the UK I lived in a large city, while in NZ I live in a rural town.
But its good to hear that you are finally catching up with NZ.
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But its good to hear that you are finally catching up with NZ.
Er... that's literally the headline of the article.
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It's good that we are getting there, but frustrating that we are so far behind the times, and that some people pay way over the odds for it.
Some countries started getting gigabit fibre decades ago. For Japan it was in the 2000s, and I remember how it was a completely different experience using it. These days they have near universal fibre, DSL hasn't been available for installation for years, and the base speed is 10Gb, with 20Gb being available in many cities too.
In the UK it's also a postcode lottery. A f
Re: Great but (Score:1)
That's crazy, my old little town in southern Kansas had fiber to every house
Re: Great but (Score:2)
Wait, I've been told for decades that America was the worst with regard to broadband coverage? What happened?
Re: Great but (Score:2)
How LARGE is England? (Score:1)
Re:How LARGE is England? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. The population weighted density of the US and Europe are fairly similar, although England is on the high side, similar to California and Nevada.
Population weighted density is the correct metric, not population density. Nobody is proposing running fibre to every square metre.
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The entire country would fit in what? 2 states in America? Love all these "this country has better/faster internet than the USA" stories. Yeah, and most of those countries fit within 1-2 states in America. In other words, we are SPREAD OUT.
I was going to post much the same if nobody else did.
Complaints of the slow spread of infrastructure in the USA are usually in matters concerning cellular service or EV chargers but internet access will certainly rank high on the list too. As I see it there's two things that slow the spread of infrastructure in the USA besides how spread out the population centers are in the USA.
One thing slowing down infrastructure expansion is government interference. We have governments that love to hand out subsidies
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The entire country would fit in what? 2 states in America? Love all these "this country has better/faster internet than the USA" stories.
American is 80% urban population. The fact that Alaska is vast and unpopulated has no real bearing on how hard it is to install fibre in the east coast economic corridor.
Yeah, and most of those countries fit within 1-2 states in America. In other words, we are SPREAD OUT.
NOT THAT MUCH you aren't.
"Fibre" (Score:3)
Dumb paywall, but for reference, "full fibre" is not fully fibre still.
FTTC for the most part. 80+-year-old telephone lines for the rest.
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No there's actually a lot of FTTP now. This is the whole point: it's now practical for 3rd parties to run fibres, which won't use the BT cabinets anyway. On my street, CommunityFibre will string fibres on telegraph poles and they're offering speeds up to 3gbit/s. Though quite how anyone on the street verifies they get what they've paid for is a mystery to me.