Broadband speed: How can it affect your business?

Ready for the future of Broadband?

In findings released yesterday, it has been discovered that the UK is severely lagging behind over the speed of broadband services. The survey carried out by Oxford University's Business School and Spain's University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics, and sponsored by the networking company Cisco, carried out the survey looking at the quality of broadband.

Over half of the 66 countries studied enjoyed broadband connections at the level of performance required to deliver a consistent quality experience for most common web applications today, but some major countries such as the UK, Spain and Italy on average fell just below this threshold.

For businesses in Britain, the speed of the internet could have a huge affect. If you spend your days on the internet, looking for research for example, slow internet speed can hold you back in your work while you have to wait for a page to load.

Slow broadband service may also stop someone from viewing your website, especially if your site contains features such as Flash, which can take longer to load. How many times have you given up on a site because it's taking too long to load? I know I'm guilty of that.

The quality of high-speed connections available here are only "meeting the needs of today's applications", according to the study, which puts the UK's broadband at 31st in the world, behind Korea and Japan - the leaders - but also countries such as Lithuania, Romania, and Latvia, which it says are all "ready for tomorrow" in the quality of their high-speed connectivity.

The measure looks at the "Broadband Quality Score", a combination of download speed, upload speed and "latency" - the latter being a measure of how long it takes a packet of internet data to travel from its source to its destination.

The UK is among those with the widest penetration of broadband, with around 70 percent of households having it, but does not stand out for the quality of connectivity, the report found.

With the Digital Britain plans, UK landlines will have a tax of 50p per month which will be used to encourage the building of next-generation systems such as optical fibre connections to streets and homes that will be capable of download speeds of 100 megabits per second or more. Presently most people are promised maximum download speeds of 8Mbps - though the actual median figure is about 3.6Mbps, with a number of areas still unable to get broadband, and instead having to rely on dial-up connections that run at about 2 percent of that average speed.

The study found that Sweden has the highest quality broadband in Europe, and is rapidly catching up with Japan and South Korea - the world leaders - as its BQS improves 38 percent from 2008. Sweden is also the most successful country in closing the broadband quality gap with residents outside the most populated cities enjoying better quality than those in the cities. Yet London does not figure in the top 20 cities with the "best" broadband.

One thing that must be considered when looking at the table, is that the UK's internet network and broadband cables were installed long before those in places such as Romania and Latvia, where such services are quite new. The task of ripping up the existing network of cables is a daunting one for the UK government, and extremely expensive. So, whereas the UK is behind the moment, it will not be in the future.

Like this article? Get the RSS feed: