Ofcom Report on UK Telecom Infrastructure with Broadband Quality Map

Entrepreneurs and house hunters can now check the quality of broadband speed in a prospective area they are planning to move to.  The British telecom regulator Ofcom has produced an interactive map that gives an estimate of what speed you can expect from the different administrative regions. They have have also published an infrastructure report highlighting the current state of the UK telecom infrastructure (fixed broadband and wireless 2G/3G) and how it is being used.

The average broadband speed across the UK stand at 7.5Mbs with ongoing work to improve the infrastructure. This has allowed us to increase our data consumption seven fold over the last five years; which they think if this trend should continue provider will have to make huge investment to keep up. 

BT plans to introduce technology in 2012 that will deliver up to 80Mbit/s over copper lines and 300Mbit/s over fibre. On average each UK home consumed approximately 17G in the month of March this year.

Data shows that 2G is accessible from over 97% of premises and 73% 3G. Rural areas continue to be behind in receiving better quality connections although there is ongoing work to address this. While coverage of premises is high, overall geographic coverage by all four 2G operators is 66% (just 13% for 3G).

Ofcom said they plan to auction radio spectrum in 2012 that will enable the deployment of ‘LongTerm Evolution’ (LTE) next-generation wireless technologies such as Femtocell which will help meet growing capacity demands.