Broadband speed map reveals Britain’s new digital divide

[Arthur]

Link: https://ig.ft.com/gb-broadband-speed-map

 

Ever since the internet moved from the squawky sound of a dial-up connection to the instant gratification of broadband, politicians have worried about the countryside being left behind. Across the world, governments have fretted about the digital divide — the gap in speeds between rural and urban areas that seemed to offer privileged access to the internet for those people who live in cities.

 

Yet in Great Britain, at least, something very different is happening. A detailed analysis by the Financial Times of data provided by the industry regulator Ofcom shows that consumers in some of the most rural areas enjoy broadband speeds considerably faster than those in the middle of London or Manchester.

 

Within Great Britain, there are only 44 postcodes that offer average speeds of 1GBit/s, the “gigabit speed” broadband that is seen as a benchmark for the ideal standard for internet connections in the future — and is more than 20 times faster than the current average. British readers can put their postcode in the interactive map below to see internet speeds in their area.

 

Three of those are in urban areas. The fastest postcodes include Wray, a remote village in rural Lancashire popular with ramblers, the Cherwell Valley, a non-metropolitan region of Oxfordshire, and Epping Forest, the largest open space in Greater London. Even those urban postcodes that received the top score are in York, the historic English city of about 200,000 people, not in any of the large population centres.

 

The areas of the country with ultrafast internet have often taken a go-it-alone approach. Small telecoms operators such as B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North) in Lancashire and CityFibre in York have replaced old copper wires with their own fibre-optic networks that are independent of the traditional national network, controlled by Openreach, BT’s engineering arm.

 

And while the data show that speeds are generally faster in urban areas compared with rural ones, this is often the result of strong investment in the suburbs. One of the most striking features of the British internet reality is that connections are very poor in the centre of the main cities, including London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. In many of those cases, the speed is below the 10 MBit/s threshold set for the “universal service obligation” that the government is set to introduce as a minimum standard for broadband access over the coming years.

 

In Britain, the digital divide is often not between urban and rural areas: it is between the suburbs and the inner city.