Study finds UK among top countries for broadband reliability

The report is based on Opensignal’s Broadband Reliability Experience metric, which is designed to assess users' ‘real-world fixed broadband experience’ across 18 countries with varying income levels and characteristics.

In terms of the report’s methodology, we’re told it measures the ‘entire user experience’, from establishing a connection to completing tasks like streaming video, browsing the web, and scrolling through social media. In doing so it ‘captures the true end-to-end reliability experience’ by analysing TCP (transmission control protocol) and UDP (user datagram protocol) – which it claims gives a ‘comprehensive measure of every aspect of households' experience with their ISP’s network.’

The report says: “The digital divide discussion often focuses on access and speed. While these measures indicate broadband availability, they do not fully capture the benefits high-speed internet brings, such as doing schoolwork, playing games, or earning a living remotely.” 

Moving on to the findings, Sweden, Norway, United Kingdom, Canada, Japan and the United States were classified as having ‘higher reliability’ while India, Colombia, Mexico, Philippines, and Indonesia were at the bottom of the table.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, urban areas performed better than rural areas across the board.‘ Broadband reliability was found to be on average 23% higher in urban areas than in rural areas across all markets. This was attributed to the higher concentration of people and households in urban areas making it economically viable for service providers to invest in infrastructure. 

The cost per user for installing and maintaining broadband networks is also lower due to the higher number of potential subscribers in a given area, says the report, and those in urban areas benefit from more underlying infrastructure, such as roads, power supply, and utility services, ‘which can be leveraged to deploy broadband networks more efficiently.’

Colombia was found to have the largest disparity with regard to the reliability gap between urban and rural areas, with about 38% lower rural broadband reliability experience than urban.

The report also says that reliability in some middle-income markets is on par or better than rural experience in some rich markets – giving the example of reliability in urban Chile being superior to the rural experience in all rich markets other than the Nordics and Canada, and that urban households in Poland enjoy more reliable broadband than rural households in Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, USA and Japan.

Meanwhile households in urban areas were found to have greater uptake of higher speed brackets, ‘revealing significant differences in the quality of internet service available to residents in rural areas.’

All in all, the thrust of the report’s conclusion is that urban centres enjoy superior broadband reliability due to higher population density and better infrastructure, and some middle-income countries, like Chile and Poland have managed urban reliability ‘that outshines even rural areas in wealthier nations’.

It also claims that countries that limit infrastructure sharing and focus on targeted rural investments see ‘remarkable improvements,’ and that in order to improve connectivity across the board ‘we need bold policies, widespread fibre adoption, and innovative solutions to geographical challenges.’

It sort of goes without saying that increased fibre adoption would lead to a rising of the tide in connectivity in any given area, but there’s certainly something to be said for measuring whether the internet is reliable or not in a more holistic, or as the report puts it more ‘real-world’, way than the potential mbps speed stats that packages are marketed with.