UK's full fibre coverage rises to 8%

Charlotte Whyatt • 20 Sep 2019

Coverage was extended out to an additional 400,000 homes between January and April 2019.

A new Ofcom report has highlighted that 8% of all UK premises now have access to full fibre broadband.

The watchdog published the latest addition of their Connected Nations report on Tuesday, which revealed that full fibre coverage was extended out to an additional 400,000 homes between January and April of this year. 

This acted to increase the UK's full fibre coverage from the 7% noted by the previous report to 8%.  

Full fibre broadband refers to when a broadband connection, from the exchange to green street cabinet to your home, consists entirely of next-generation fibre cables.

These offer significantly faster speeds than the standard mix of fibre and copper, which will continue to improve as the technology gets better. 

The report also found that the number of UK households unable to access a speed of 10Mbps has fallen to 2% from 619,000 to just 578,000. 

54% of the UK’s homes and businesses can now receive ultrafast broadband, defined as speeds of 300Mbps or more, up from 53% before while superfast broadband coverage remained steady at 95%.

Although Prime Minister Boris Johnson previously promised that the whole of the UK would receive a full fibre connection by 2025, news site ISPreview claim the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) are likely to “water down” his pledge.

Instead, they'll now focus on providing “gigabit capable” infrastructure to the whole of the UK. 

Source: BBC