It's no surprise that rural, remote areas like the Lake District, Orkney Islands and Argyll and Bute have the UK's slowest broadband, but parts of London aren't all that much faster, thanks to old technology, poverty and the testing methodology itself.
Orkney posted an average speed of 3Mbps (megabits per second) in consumer group Which's annual broadband research, with Argyll and Bute averaging 7Mbps, both well below the government's plans to guarantee a minimum 10Mbps this year. Tower Hamlets and Westminster both just meet that figure, according to the research.
Broadband speeds remain slower in rural areas than urban one, with Ofcom noting that 53 per cent of rural residents have average connections below 10Mbps versus 16 per cent in urban areas – so don't expect much sympathy from village dwellers. That said, complaints about sluggish connections in pockets of London aren't new. The City of London has long complained about disappointing broadband speeds, while residents of Rotherhithe in Southwark report connections crawling along at 0.26Mbps.
Old technology is at fault. It's a bit more complicated than this, but generally speaking, the more copper is involved, the slower the broadband speed. Most UK broadband consists of a line running from an exchange into a local, street-level cabinet, and another line running from that cabinet to a home or business. In some areas, both lines are copper telephone lines, with no fibre at all. In other cases, the line to the cabinet is fibre but the line out remains cable or ADSL, known as fibre-to-the-cabinet (FttC). The fastest broadband happens when there's fibre running both in and out of the cabinet, known as fibre-to-the-premise (FttP) or full fibre.
Why don't we have full fibre everywhere? Financial costs and limited resources have constrained the rollout and BT's infrastructure arm Openreach and Virgin have rolled out fibre to the cabinet but no further in most cases. That will usually give homes and businesses decent broadband speeds, and is cheaper and easier to roll out than full fibre. Openreach is already rolling out some full fibre, including to both Westminster and Tower Hamlets, as are smaller rivals such as Hyperoptic. "It's a longer job and it takes a lot of work," says Steve Holford, director of operations at Hyperoptic.
However, some streets don't even have fibre to the cabinet, including sections of Westminster that are exchange only, notes Andrew Ferguson, editor-in-chief of broadband comparison site ThinkBroadband. Many of those areas missed out on the fibre-to-the-cabinet upgrades and haven't yet been given full fibre, though that's starting to change. "You're seeing groups of people club together in little blocks of flat to pay for their own cabinets to get speed upgrades," Ferguson notes.
Beyond the costs and technical challenges of upgrading broadband infrastructure, there are more mundane delays. Ferguson says some landlords will block their tenants from having fibre installed simply because a hole needs to be drilled to run a new cable into the building. In the City of London, Openreach has struggled to get wayleave agreements, which give permission to do work on private land. "There's weird little bits of London where the borough doesn't own the little bit of pavement in front of the building because of some agreement from 400 years ago," Ferguson says. "That's how complex London is." Or, as Holford puts it: "There are definitely challenges. If this was really easy, it would have been done a while ago."
Those are the technical reasons behind plodding broadband speeds in London, but low average speeds are still reported in areas with full fibre. According to ThinkBroadband data from September 2018, Tower Hamlets had 31.6 per cent full fibre coverage, well above the London average of 7.3 per cent and UK-wide average of 4.1 per cent. Yet the average speed in Tower Hamlets was about 10Mbps, according to Which. What gives?
Part of that gap is down to how extremely slow the very worst connections are, pulling down the average. "Some of the people in those areas get great speeds, but the rest are still on that decades-old technology," Holford says. While three in ten Tower Hamlet residents have access to full fibre, many of the remaining seven in ten are stuck entirely on copper with speeds below 5mpbs, yanking that average down, he adds.
Another slice of the gap is because of slow take-up of fibre broadband. Better connections are available, but not everyone signs up. Tower Hamlets has 31 per cent full-fibre coverage, but only 12 per cent of homes in the area have opted to pay for it, according to ThinkBroadband. An Openreach spokesperson noted that Tower Hamlets has 94 per cent superfast coverage, which is any line offering 24Mbps and above, regardless of whether it's fibre or copper. If everyone bought the best package available, the spokesperson claimed, the average speed would leap to 409Mbps. Westminster is similar: it has 84 per cent superfast coverage, and average speeds would leap to 298Mbps if everyone in the area paid for the best broadband available.
Why aren't people in Tower Hamlets and Westminster shelling out for superfast? Fibre connections remain more expensive than standard broadband; BT charges £5 more a month for its basic fibre broadband versus non-fibre connections, while its top-end product is a further £6 premium, at £44 a month after signup discounts expire. Westminster might be home to some of the richest people in the UK, but it also has one of the highest levels of child poverty in the UK; Tower Hamlets is one of the most deprived local authorities in England. Simply put, not everyone can afford full fibre. "Some of those who have not upgrade, it's because of price," says Ferguson, though he adds that "prices have come down a bit for the sort of partial fibre solutions".
Multi-year contracts don't help, especially for renters. "Some of it may be people not wanting to enter into new contracts," Ferguson says. "If you're a short-term renter, on a six-month tenancy, you're not going to sign up to a 12- or 18-month contract for your broadband if you might be kicked out in six months' time."
Technical issues and costs aside, another reason for the lower-than-expected speeds is the research methodology itself, which could mean the median speeds skew lower than other tests. According to Which, the UK's median broadband speed is 16Mbps, but rival figures suggest it's much higher. ThinkBroadband pins the UK average at 37.5Mbps, while regulator Ofcom pegs it at 46.2Mbps for 2017.
Some of the differences could be down to methodology. Which crowdsources its data from an online speed test, with 277,000 run over the previous year. Users tap a button, and the website pings servers to time broadband download and upload speeds. While the ease of the test means the organisation can nab a big chunk of broadband users from across the country, slower speeds could be recorded because of local conditions, such as an old router, weak Wi-Fi signal or other interference, such as someone in the house running a bandwidth-hogging download.
ThinkBroadband uses a similar test, but cleans up its data to remove people clearly using Wi-Fi – such as those running a test on an Android device – and those people repeatedly using the test to diagnose a fault. Ofcom does not rely on user reporting, but works with a company called SamKnows that installs a monitoring device on the line, helping to avoid such issues. If you do check your connection via the Which test wirelessly and find it's slower than expected, you may need a new router or Wi-Fi extender – more than a million UK homes are running old hardware, and getting new kit is much easier than waiting for a country-wide infrastructure upgrade to land on your street.
The finer points of testing methodology will be of little solace to those Londoners stuck on weak connections, but there is good news: the full fibre is spreading and average speeds continue to climb – the Ofcom figures are up by 28 per cent over the past year, the Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) says. That trend should continue from market forces alone, but the government is also promising a universal service obligation of 10Mbps by 2020, which ISPA notes will give everyone the legal right to request a connection with that speed, though residents may have to shell out to get it.
So to those in Tower Hamlets and Westminster languishing on connections below 10Mbps, have patience — you should be good at waiting by now — as faster connections are coming, eventually. "The rollout of full fibre will accelerate," says Holford. "It's a case of just getting the service to as many of these people who may be suffering as quickly as we can."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
