UK Ranked 18th For Broadband

The UK has been ranked 18th in the world for broadband leadership in Cisco’s broadband study, up from 25th place last year, but the country’s Internet infrastructure is not yet “ready for tomorrow,” according to the report.

The annual study, carried out by the University of Oxford’s Said Business School and the University of Oviedo in Spain, measures both quality and penetration of Internet services around the world. The results are based on data from 40 million broadband quality tests conducted between May and June of 2010 on the Internet speed testing site, speedtest.net.

Broadband quality improving

Overall, worldwide broadband quality has improved by 50 percent in three years, with 14 of the 72 countries surveyed having the broadband quality required to support smart and connected communities. Penetration of broadband also continues to improve, with 49 percent of the countries investigated now having access to broadband.

South Korea topped the table for the second year running, with an average download throughput of 33.5 Mbps and average upload of 17 Mbps. Latency is 47ms and penetration is 100 percent. Other countries deemed “ready for tomorrow” included Japan, Latvia, Sweden, Bulgaria, Finland, Romania, Lithuania, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Germany, Portugal, Denmark and Iceland.

While most people in the UK are “comfortably enjoying today’s applications”, with an average download speed of 6.4Mbps, the infrastructure is not yet in place for the “applications of tomorrow” – such as high definition Internet TV and high quality video communications services.

According to the report, these applications would require an average download speed of 11Mbps and an upload speed of 5Mbps. Fernando Gil de Bernabé, senior director at Cisco, said the UK is still lagging far behind this, with average upload speeds of just 580-600kbps. However, Bernabé told eWEEK Europe this was “a typical situation for a country where you have a lot of DSL-based broadband” .

Despite this, the UK has made significant improvements in both latency – which has decreased by 28 percent to just 51ms – and penetration – which increased from 67 percent in 2008 to 74 percent in 2010. “In two years it’s an 18 percent improvement, which makes the UK stay in the same ranking that it was in 2008,” said Bernabé.

Emerging economies ‘leapfrog’ others

One interesting finding of the report was that many emerging economies have been “leapfrogging” other more advanced countries, by investing more in delivering high quality broadband to their cities first, as key hubs of economic development. This is in contrast to the approach of the UK and other developed economies, which have focused on upgrading old copper-based broadband in order to bring broadband to as much of the population as possible and narrow the digital divide.

“If I had to pick one key aspect of this year’s study, it would be the unprecedented speed at which a country can become a broadband leader,” said Tony Hart, associate fellow of the Saïd Business School. “Compared to the many growth-enabling infrastructures of the past – the telephone, electricity, railways, etc. – which took many decades or even centuries to impact the wider population, we can see that high quality Internet access can have an impact on the bulk of the population within just a few years, and its impact will reach the developing world much faster than any other technology of the past.”

Those countries that have overtaken more advanced economies in terms of broadband quality include Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic and Hungary in Eastern Europe, as well as Bulgaria, Qatar and Bahrain, which were found to lead their economic groups in broadband quality by considerable margin. However, while the broadband quality in these countries is high, the penetration is relatively low, affecting their overall ranking as broadband leaders .

Discussing this trend, Bernabé said that developing countries were doing the right thing. “You can’t just follow what we have done in developed countries because if you follow you will always be a follower,” he said. “You need to find a way to lift up. They are not ashamed to recognise that they are addressing the cities first. From an economic perspective it makes sense to bet on the cities, as centres of economic development.”

UK broadband

The British government is currently working to improve the state of broadband in UK, both in terms of quality, with investment in fibre technology, and in terms of penetration, with a pledge to get the last remaining 10,000 Brits online by 2015.

However, the sad state of rural broadband was recently highlighted, when a pigeon beat a computer in a race to transfer a 300MB video 75 miles. The pigeon made the journey in just 80 minutes, while the computer only managed to upload 24 percent of the video in this time. Earlier this year, Ofcom slammed Internet service providers for advertising speeds that consumers were not able to receive.

Despite this, a study released last week by BskyB found that only 30 percent of consumers are frustrated with the consistency of their Internet speed, with 44 percent claiming they “don’t know” or “don’t care” how fast their connection is.