Broadband

(asked on 13th October 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of trends in changes to broadband download speeds (a) regionally and (b) between urban and rural areas since 23 March 2020.


Answered by
Matt Warman Portrait
Matt Warman
This question was answered on 16th October 2020

The Ofcom Connected Nations report is published every 6 months. From this data we can see that as of May, 14.5% of the UK currently have full fibre broadband available. 15% of urban properties have full fibre broadband available. 12.4% of rural properties have full fibre broadband available.

Currently Thinkbroadband (http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/uk) shows that 27.2% of premises across the UK have access to Gigabit capable broadband, however it does not provide a urban/rural split. This is up from 18% in March 2020.

A breakdown of Full Fibre service by region is as follows:

Jan 2020

May 2020

East Midlands

8.7

10.1

East of England

6.6

8.6

London

15.4

18.5

North East

4.1

5.2

North West

10.2

12.0

Northern Ireland

39.5

47.4

Scotland

10.2

12.8

South East

9.3

10.8

South West

14.2

16.8

Wales

13.3

15.3

West Midlands

11.8

13.7

Yorkshire and The Humber

19.5

22.0

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