Mousetrap weblog: Why the countryside can't catch up

A digital divide still separates London from the rest of the country, with broadband speeds nearly twice as fast in the capital as in Wales and Northern Ireland.

A survey of more than 138,000 web connections released today by thinkbroadband.com found that Londoners enjoyed an average download speed of 4.5 megabits per second. Northern Ireland’s average speed of 2.3Mbps was the slowest in the UK.

Scotland, Wales and rural parts of England also recorded connection speeds well below the UK average of 3.2Mbps.

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• Broadband - why the countryside can't catch up

“Many rural areas and towns don’t have the advanced higher speeds available elsewhere,” Andrew Ferguson, editor of thinkbroadband.com, said.

Two weeks ago, Ofcom reported that rural homes were more likely to have a broadband connection than urban ones, leading the regulator's chief executive tosay that "the report highlights a closing of the geographic digital divide in the UK.”

Mr Ferguson rejected this claim.

“Ofcom say the digital divide doesn’t exist,” he said. “In terms of people wanting broadband and being able to get it, it would seem the divide has been removed, but divide does exist in broadband speeds [for] those in dense urban areas and those in rural areas.”

Connection speeds are slower in rural areas because existing broadband technology is less efficient in sparsely populated areas, and companies offering ultrahigh-speed connections have been largely confined to big cities.

Most British broadband connections rely on ADSL technology to carry internet data across copper phone lines. Using this system, the signal degrades as it travels down the line, so that the speed of an individual home’s web connection depends on its distance from a telephone exchange.

Since rural exchanges serve larger areas, the average distance between each home or business and the telephone exchange is greater and the average download speed is therefore slower.

After BT started letting rival companies install their own equipment on the telephone network – a process known as local-loop unbundling – several companies have begun to replace copper wires with fibre-optic cable. This allows them to offer much faster web connections that do not degrade with distance.

BT itself is working to upgrade the existing national network, using a technology called ADSL2+ to squeeze greater speeds out of the copper infrastructure.

Last year, the UK overtook the US in terms of broadband speeds and penetration, but it lags behind many European countries, including Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania and Germany. Scandinavia and Eastern Europe have invested heavily in high-speed data networks, and BT said that catching up would be expensive.

“A number of people are talking about higher speeds and that’s going to cost a lot of money,” Brendan Dick, the national manager of BT in Scotland, told BBC Radio 4. “There’s very strong evidence that for the vast majority of the population, what we have meets their need.

“BT is looking hard at what we can do in a commercially sensible way to build fibre into the network in the medium and longer term,” he added.

Mr Ferguson agreed that cost was the main factor holding back broadband speeds in the UK.

“The technology exists and it’s out there,” he said. “The problem is it costs money and we don’t want to pay a lot for our broadband connection.”

Download speeds around the UK

London: 4.46 Mbps

North East: 3.59 Mbps

North West: 3.39 Mbps

East Midlands: 3.28 Mbps

South East: 3.25 Mbps

Yorkshire: 3.20 Mbps

West Midlands: 3.19 Mbps

East: 3.09 Mbps

Scotland: 2.88 Mbps

South West: 2.87 Mbps

Wales: 2.59 Mbps

Northern Ireland:2.26 Mbps

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