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

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what estimates his Department has made of the number of homeworkers unable to use videoconferencing due to insufficient bandwidth on their broadband connection.

The Department does not track this data as it is tracked by our arms-length-body/regulator Ofcom.They published the following report which concludes that whilst there has been a significant surge in daytime network traffic networks have, on the whole, stood up to this demand.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/media/media-releases/2020/broadband-networks-during-pandemic

This is likely to be because networks are dimensioned to cope with the normal (pre-COVID) evening peak which, due to the combination of entertainment based video streaming, video on demand and gaming traffic, is similar to the daytime traffic peak levels seen during the pandemic.