UK ranked 22nd globally in broadband advancement

  • July 23, 2010

The UK has ranked 22nd among the word’s top broadband developed nations according to the research firm Strategy Analytics.

The firm has released the results of its analysis by comparing the broadband services in 57 nations on the basis of their performance in areas like speed, cost, urban quotient, affordability and household penetration.

The Broadband Composite Index (BCI) is a multifactor index that measures each country’s over-all performance in these areas, thus, it ‘is a superior indicator of a country’s relative broadband advancement’, Ben Piper, director of marketing dynamics at Strategy Analytics has claimed.

As per the findings, the BCI for UK stood at 5.97 which was slightly better than the USA (5.96), however, other European nations like France (6.45) and Germany (6.38) ranked even better with 12th and 15th places respectively, in the league table.

South Korea topped the BCI figures with a score of 9.14 followed by Hong Kong (7.58), the Netherlands (7.53), Lithuania (7.52) and Japan (7.42).

The UK broadband penetration rate has become slower in the last two years, many reports have suggested. The year on year growth fell to 1.4%, comparing to the EU average of 2%, according to the latest annual report on the Single European Electronic Communications Market.

UK has also ranked poorly when it comes to global broadband speeds. It ranked just 33rd in Ookla’s global broadband speed survey with an average download speed of 7.69Mbps which could not even reach the one-fourth of the speeds received by the speediest nation, South Korea which has averaged 34.19Mbps.

The EU survey also showed that only one out of five broadband users in UK receive broadband speeds of more than 10Mbps.

On average, a home user in Uk pays £13.65 a month for a DSL broadband connection, the EU report shows.

The UK also lags behind when it comes to the deployment of Fibre to the Home (FTTH) broadband which can deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps. Currently, UK has over 5000 FTTH lines, comparing to the European neighbours, Sweden which has over 5.3m FTTH connections, Italy (3.2m) and France (3m) according to the last month’s report from FTTH council Europe.