Business broadband in the UK is getting faster

Between October 2007 and May 2008 the number of businesses using broadband running at 10Mbps or higher has increased from 18 percent to 25 percent and those using a 50Mbps line or higher are currently at 13 percent.

Point Topic has released a survey of organizations, which includes the public sector and found that not only are businesses looking for higher speed broadband connections but the future shows that this speed requirement is going to become even greater.
A senior analyst at Point Topic, Tim Johnson said “Over 800,000 workplaces will be in the market for more bandwidth, 45% of UK premises expect to want more speed within the next two to three years and 7% significantly more”.

It also appears that the need for larger bandwidth grows proportionally to the size of the business. Of those surveyed from medium to large businesses and workplaces, with 10 staff or more, 61 percent said that they would need higher speed broadband in the future, whereas of the smaller businesses surveyed on 39 percent said that this would be the case.

The most popular download speed at the moment is 8Mbps, used by 33 percent of businesses in Britain. Although this is the largest proportion of broadband use this has dropped since October 2007 by 8 percent and this is due to many of the companies, in recent months, moving across to the faster broadband connections.

Of the companies that moved above the 8Mbps broadband speeds 12 percent reported speeds higher than 10Mbps. There were a further 5 percent that used a 50Mbps package, 100Mbps are used by 6 percent of businesses and those using connections beyond the 100Mbps mark made up for 2 percent of the companies surveyed.

Changes in the number of companies that access the internet using connection speeds of less that 2Mbps has remained relatively unchanged since the survey was last carried out back in October 2007 and shows that 21 percent of businesses are still connecting at these speeds.

Johnson concluded from this “Remote access, remote helpdesks, video conferencing and VOIP are all becoming more embedded in day to day organisational use. These applications are the primary drivers for the increasing speeds organisations require now and in the future.”