UK falls the 11th in broadband league due to slow high-speed rollout progress

The latest league table of broadband access per capita among the 30 leading economies in the world has placed the UK in 11th position.

The UK has the fifth largest broadband subscriber numbers, which places it behind Germany, France, Japan and the US according to research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

On a scale of broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, however, the UK dropped into 11th place overall, which was in part due to the progress made in fibre optic connectivity running at high-speed being too slow. Denmark is currently the leader in a table of broadband by population, with The Netherlands and Norway in second and third position.

Unfortunately the UK currently doesn’t even show on the OECD scale for fibre-based broadband. Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the Slovak republic current have a respective penetration of 48, 43, 20 and 19 percent of their total broadband connections and are currently the leader fibre-based connections.

An investment of £1.5 billion in optical fibre rollout has been promised by the UK’s main operator, BT, and in its final Digital Britain report that is due for release next month the UK government will be announcing how the UK could be impacted by rollouts of upgraded network infrastructures.

The selection of projects that can stimulate the current demand, but also provide a long term expansion of the productive capacity of the economy, and the evaluation of the benefits and costs of any investment by the public in communications infrastructure by policy makers is argued by the research from the OECD.

The report states “All public investments in telecommunications should balance four key items – connectivity, competition, innovation/growth and social benefit.”

Equating to 22.6 subscribers per 100 inhabitants the number of subscribers to broadband in all the OECD countries by December 2008 reached a total of 267 million.

According to the OECD the UK has the equivalent of 28.5 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, with a total of 11 275 660.