Is Your Internet Connection Slow? Broadband Internet Speeds Lag in the UK
The UK continues to be behind the rest of the world when it comes to broadband speed.
A report by the International Communications Market Report showed that only 10 per cent of broadband connections in the UK have a speed of over 8Mbit/s, compared to 26 per cent in France, 33 per cent in Sweden and 37 per cent in The Netherlands.
An analyst with Analysys Mason, Richard Thurston, stated that broadband speeds in the UK are on the rise, as companies like BT are beginning to roll out super-fast broadband services to 40 per cent of the population. He said, “Speeds are increasing quite rapidly and homes and businesses in areas that receive the new broadband will see a vast improvement in their services.”
Still, the figures will be debated further after a recent Eurostat report placed the UK eighth in the EU for broadband speeds. The report will also put more pressure on the government’s universal service commitment to get the entire population online with minimum speeds of 2Mbit/s by 2012.
A 2Mbit/s connection will be a marked improvement for many businesses in rural areas, but could still not be fast enough for a lot of consumers, Thurston noted.
The report did note that while speeds are not the highest, the UK does have some of the lowest costs for broadband services, decreased 10.1 per cent since 2003, to an average of around £16 per month, compared to £20 in the US, £23 in Italy and £25 in Spain. While the prices in the UK are some of the lowest, Thurston argued that they are unlikely to get much lower and may start to rise again. He stated, “Certainly for consumer ADSL the price seems unlikely to fall much further, but business fibre connections for next generation access are still falling across Europe.”
Mobile data has risen dramatically in the UK, the report revealed, with almost 24 per cent of mobile revenues being derived from non-SMS services, up from 7 per cent in 2003.