Broadband: Standards

(asked on 24th June 2020) - View Source

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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is the average cost quoted to individuals who have sought a better broadband connection under the Universal Service Obligation launched on 20 March.


Answered by
Baroness Barran Portrait
Baroness Barran
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This question was answered on 6th July 2020

The broadband Universal Service Obligation (USO) provides every household with the legal right to request a broadband connection that provides download speeds of at least 10Mbps and an upload speed of at least 1Mbps, where this is not already available commercially.

Performance monitoring of the Universal Service Obligation is the responsibility of Ofcom. Chapter 9 of the Universal Service Statement by Ofcom sets out the reporting requirements for Universal Service Providers (BT and KCOM) who will be required to report at least every six months on the number of USO requests received, the number of requests accepted, the number of Confirmed Orders received that involved a customer agreeing to pay excess costs and the number of requests rejected by the Universal Service Provider including an explanation of the reason why.

As the Universal Service Obligation launched on 20 March 2020, no statistics on its progress have yet been published by Ofcom.

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