is the population digital skills (very low skilled in average) which brings to extremely low take up of FTTH, with a few other facts to consider: there's no cable at all (CATV was blocked at the time of its birth and has never been considered since); mobile data is among the cheapest in the EU (when I go to my parents in Italy I have a prepaid eSIM that for 8€ a month gives me 150GB); people are also not willing very often to carry out the adequate works needed in some cases to bring the fibre cable indoors, because Italy doesn't particularly like aerial fibre, its population likes to live primarily "in my own home" which means single detached self-built houses, it must be underground and this means those customers will happily remain on ADSL/FTTC.

So priority of people is cheap, not fast or performant internet, and zero fuss about installation.

On the other hand, nowadays you can get a 1000/300 on GPON for under 25-28€ a month and 2.5G/1G for around 34-36€ a month.

Some of the speeds quoted in the article are impressive, and much faster than the UK average, but I wonder if such high speeds are more than enough for the vast majority of use cases.

Based on these figures, my home broadband is a bit below average, but it's *plenty* fast enough for everyday tasks, streaming music/video, accessing content-heavy websites, etc. The only thing I seem to struggle with is performance of my local newspaper's website, but that's my PC fighting with all of the advertorial content that's been downloaded rather than a bottleneck in the network.

Maybe the UK has a fleet of Ford Mondeos while the rest of the world has Ferraris, but when most people just want to commute to/from work, pop down the shops or pootle up the motorway on a trip, what are they missing out on by not having a sports car?

Personally I'm more bothered about the availability of a usable service, i.e. rural >2.5G mobile data rather than colossal Mbps figures that go beyond what might realistically be needed.

I would absolutely prioritise getting a 50/10Mbps connection to every household in the country ahead of getting a Gig connection to people living in city centres.

It's not that I would want to be constrained to 50Mbps, I just want broadband to be a basic utility rather than a postcode based one.

Spot on. The comment about 'dawdling with FTTC' is stupid. More backbone fibre and squeezing what there is out of local copper helps out those people on the lowest speeds. Sure it's not always that simple but headline speeds and mean speeds aren't a useful metric in determining how equitable your internet provision is.

What we need is a big initiative to get everyone up to the same level, with a catchy name. Any suggestions?

If you want to guarantee a minimum performance with VDSL2 or GFast is going to be impossible. Distance from cabinet, crosstalk and interference from other EMFs, issues with wiring both outdoor and indoor... there's no other way around than fibre to the home to give an equal service to everyone. The fast speeds are a separate matter in my opinion, that's commercial stuff (and as I say in my post above, in some countries like Italy where take-up is incredibly slow they pushed on the big numbers to try convince customers and now we actually see that in the UK too with some of the local ISPs).

"What we need is a big initiative to get everyone up to the same level, with a catchy name. Any suggestions?"

British Broadband? https://labour.org.uk/press/british-broadband-labour-sets-out-mission-to-connect-communities-across-britain-by-delivering-free-full-fibre-broadband-for-all/

I agree with the sentiment in your comment. Community Fibre put a letter through my door offering gigabit fibre for £25 a month. The suggested uses are for streaming 4k and heavy use on multiple devices. I would say it is.

Another advert I saw recently I saw said (paraphrased) "download a complete movie in x seconds". I can't watch it in x seconds, so unless I am going to spend my life watching movies I can't see the need (not the desire) for this.

I have their 600Mb and tbf as we work in IT we should be able to appreciate the advantages of that. I'm 99% working from home and downloading stuff is a breeze with this connection, especially the ability to do multiple bandwidth intensive tasks in parallel is a big deal for me and there's still space for the other people in the house that would want to watch Netflix and such or download a game (which nowadays are fantastically big, there's titles on Steam around 100-150GB to pull down). I guess it depends though on the family requirements.

At a site yesterday, 4 staff members. Connectivity? ADSL2+.

Town has 35 cabinets, 36 of them have FTTC. The one that serves the centre of the town? no vdsl, so adsl is your best option. I'm partly with you here.

That site might "like" fttp at high speeds, but we'd be much better off with even VDSL at 80/20 over the 16/1 we have now. Esp as there's not enough bandwidth to run VoIP over it, so we're actually having to look at getting a _new_ adsl circuit installed in 2022 to run the replacement phones.

For 4 people, a leased circuit isn't really a cost effective option.

Why are we using the mean for this comparison? Surely the median would be a much better measure. I am confident that the median UK speed would be significantly worse than 72Mbps, and would also go some way to addressing Cedric's concerns.

And I'm sure I heard Boris claiming that the UK has "70% Gigabit connections" this morning. The BBC's [1]fact-checking article doesn't seem to mention it. Aah, [2]this is the speech in full . It starts at 3m04s.

M.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/62806217

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-62804887

which might account for why UK has risen to 35th place from 43rd last year. With most countries averaging around 72 Mb/s, which is surpisingly close to 75 Mb/s, which is the average of 100 Mb/s and 50 Mb/s, making the study that of average tariffs of people choosing either and majority going for 10 Mb/s. This tells us about tarifffs but nothing about network deployment and capacity.

I've been on 4G for four years, the entire house. Because the broadband was utter tosh, and I can throw a stone from my bedroom window and hit a major London town.

BT offered me only a guaranteed FOUR Mbps. I told them to stuff it, never even bothered to activate the phone line. Literally no other suppliers of service available.

Been running off 4G ever since, including IoT, streaming media server and CCTV.

BT guy knocked on the door a few months back and promised me that everything was upgraded now and I could get "up to 50Mbps". I did a Speedtest, from my mobile, on my phone's 4G and then did it again on my house Wifi, which was running off a 4G stick. Beat them both times.

"Oh, but usage..." - unlimited.

"Oh, but cost." - £18 a month, barely more than your most basic line rental, let alone broadband package.

Someone needs to properly kill off the Openreach/BT monopoly, because it's still around and holding everything back still.

Moving to a new house the other day - same. I just have 4G both ends until I complete my move and watch the cameras of one place while I'm at the other place, and stream content from my media player from the old house every night. And that's actually a very rural place.

I was seriously considering Starlink if that wasn't going to work, but it has to be bad to make me use a Musk product by choice.

Totally agree with your comment about BT/Openreach.

BT for me guarantee 1Mb. I repeat - 1Mb. We did have a BT line (DEL) when we moved in but BT couldn't meet their guarantee - averaged out around 400Kb. At full cost. With a need to reclaim service credits monthly. And still to be marketed at for 2Mb sky services (!).

Use 4G also here. Only one tower and quite a few people using it (especially if road traffic is busy). Might get 3Mb, rising to 7Mb at quiet times.

Oh to live in London........ 5G, Gigabit, FTTP (even FTTC). I can dream....

the five top ranked countries ... are all either very small or islands

They don't have the Western Hebridies, Shetland, and the North York Moors to wire up. Having a significant chunk of your country sparsly populated wildernesses isn't going to help push you up the connectivity ranks. I remember in Sheffield - a city of more than half a million people - 20 years ago there were still some houses so isolated that they had a night soil collection.

Is mostly sparsely-populated wildernesses. Once you get away from the three big cities (two of which are really towns), communities get very small very quickly with lots of places set away from the main roads. Yet they've got 99.9% of the population on 100Mbps+ wired connections.