According to Ofcom, giagbit per second home broadband now is available to 70 percent of U.K. residences. The issue now is what percentage of homes actually buy service at gigabit speeds. Not all that many, it appears. According to Ofcom data, uptake at gigabit speeds might be as low as one percent to two percent.
About 42 percent of U.K. homes are passed by fiber-to-home facilities. Where fiber-to-home service is available, about 25 percent of homes buy the service. Only nine percent of those customers buy service at the fastest-available speed, however.
That relatively-small percentage of customers buying the fastest home broadband service is not unusual. Across a range of nations, uptake of gigabit services tends to be in single digits to low-double digits.
All of which should remind us that there is a big difference between making a product available and demand for those products. Broadband policy success might be defined as supplying X amount of bandwidth to Y homes.
It is less clear that “success” can be measured by the degree of uptake of services at any given level. Customers still have the right to buy the products they believe represent the best overall value proposition. In most cases, that means buying a level of service someplace between the lowest and highest speed tiers.
Availability is one matter; uptake quite another.
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