UK Broadband Independent Assessment – Just adequate for now

UK has been ranked 25th in terms of its broadband quality and penetration of broadband network. This statistic emerged out of a study done globally on 66 countries on the current status of broadband coverage and efficiency.

This study conducted for Cisco also revealed that Latvia and Bulgaria had made significant improvements in their broadband network and were better placed as compared to UK to usher in the next wave of advanced broadband applications. UK was grouped with other countries whose broadband UK network and quality was just enough to meet current requirements.

The countries which continue to be leaders in this field are South Korea and Japan where there has been persistent commitment to upgrade networks and South Korea have made it their mission to provide speeds up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second) by the year 2012.

However, when it comes to meeting the challenges for today, UK seems well in control and in consonance with the expectations that its broadband penetration and quality is enough to cater to the needs of today. The heartening aspect is that this situation is poised to undergo a tremendous change by next year with more and more focus being laid on up gradation of cable networks and a conscious effort on the part of the government to provide high speed networks to its people.

The Said Business School of Oxford University and the University of Oviedo’s Department of Applied Economics jointly conducted this study and also discovered that the global download speed was just 4.75Mbps(megabits per second) with the mean upload speed being 1.3Mbps.

Planning for the future

An estimation of the broadband capability of various countries to cope with the increasing demands of users of today with regard to applications like viewing YouTube, using Skype to communicate, sharing photos and videos and using standard players to view content was made and the result revealed that only 44 countries out of 66 managed to meet the required criteria. Not only that, Japan, Sweden and Latvia were the only countries who seemed to be well prepared to offer services like high-definition video that are going to be much in demand in the near future. This was however considered an improvement over last year, when only Japan made the cut.

The researchers worked on the guideline that a country would need to provide mean download speeds of 11.25Mbps and mean upload speeds of 5Mbps to be able to meet future demands for more bandwidth.

What constitutes ‘Real Speeds?’

The study made use of the site speedtest.net to focus on the download and upload speeds along with any latency in each of the 66 countries to come out with this report. It made use of over 24 million speed tests to arrive at its conclusion and that is how UK was placed at the 31st position.

However, when they combined these results with the actual broadband penetration across countries, UK showed improvement and was ranked the 25th. The researchers felt that merely looking at either broadband penetration or advertised speeds in isolation would not present the correct picture and they needed to be considered together to come to a meaningful conclusion. They also laid special emphasis on the quality of broadband that was available in each country when presenting their final report.

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