Survey refutes Ofcom's vanishing broadband divide

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 3 Jun 2008 at 09:32

A new survey has poured scorn on Ofcom's claims that the rural broadband divide is disappearing.

The Thinkbroadband.com research has found that homes in London have broadband connections that are on average twice as fast as those in the slowest region of Britain, Northern Ireland.

Regions such as Scotland, the South West, Wales and Northern Ireland all have average connection speeds below 3Mb/sec, while those in London benefit from 4.4Mb/sec.

The research, which is based on more than 138,000 individual speed tests, found that Cambridgeshire was the slowest county in Britain, with an average of only 2.7Mb/sec. The Highlands of Scotland were even worse, with a speed of only 2.2Mb/sec, although the area didn't register enough speed tests to be statistically representative.

The Thinkbroadband research comes just a fortnight after Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards claimed that "rural households are today as well connected to broadband as their urban neighbours", following a report which found that more rural homes were connected to broadband than those in urban areas.

The claims "beggared belief" according to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), who argued "internet access speeds are often appallingly slow, hitting the viability of businesses" in rural areas.

Those criticisms are echoed by Thinkbroadband, who claim the digital divide could get even worse as new technologies are deployed in the major cities. "The question is how wide are we going to allow the gulf to open up if fibre to the home or sub-loop unbundling is deployed in just parts of the UK, and does it matter?," asks the site's editor Andrew Ferguson.

"Other countries that are further down the road of true next-generation broadband services have clear gulfs in what speeds are available across their country."